Summer came to Kokura in the fifth month, wet and hot, and with it the real work began.
The yard behind Nagaoka Sado’s house was a square of beaten earth about twenty paces across, with a white plaster wall on three sides, the kitchen on the fourth, and an old cherry tree in one corner whose blossom had long since fallen.
At dawn the earth was still cool.
By the hour of the snake it was baking, and by noon the heat came up off it in waves and the cicadas in the cherry tree made a noise like a saw going through tin.
John was in the yard for most of every day.
He would remember that summer afterwards as one long day, repeated.
“Kata,” he said.
Kiku wasn’t there.
By then John had enough Japanese for kata, again, no, stupid, rice, wrong foot and better, which Musashi didn’t say very often, and Kiku came only when there were things to be explained in words, which Musashi liked to keep to a minimum.
The kata were the whole of it.
Musashi had decided on the first morning that there was nothing to be done with John’s body except replace it, slowly, with a different one.
So they did the same nine movements every dawn in the yard of the borrowed house, a thousand times, until John’s arms shook and his calluses split and the house’s old servant stopped watching from the kitchen out of pity.
They did them at noon in the heat.
They did them at night by a lantern.
They did them with oak swords, and then with iron bars as heavy as three swords, and then with nothing in his hands at all.
He wasn’t allowed to Hold.
That was the rule from the first week.
Musashi had made Kiku translate it carefully.
“He says, when you do your trick, you see.
That’s good.
But then you sit inside your seeing like a man in a bath.
You’re warm and comfortable and you look at everything, and when it’s over you have done nothing.
So: no trick until your body moves without being asked.
Then we’ll see what the trick is for.”
So he didn’t Hold.
For six weeks, and then for ten, he simply moved, with his ordinary slow body, and was hit with oak, and got up.
* * *
The worst of it was the boredom.
He had not expected that.
In the trenches there had been boredom too, weeks of it, but it had been the boredom of waiting for something terrible.
This was the boredom of doing the same nine movements five thousand times, and knowing that tomorrow he would do them five thousand times again, and that nothing terrible would happen at all, only Musashi saying no.
He found ways through it.
He counted.
He set himself small problems: how many cuts before the shadow of the cherry tree touched the wall, how many before the kitchen maid came out with the slops.
Then one morning in the fifth week he realised he had done the whole of the dawn session, a thousand cuts, without counting anything, without thinking anything, and the sun was up, and he could not remember a single one of them.
He told Musashi.
Musashi said nothing at all, which from Musashi was a great deal.
* * *
There was more to it than the kata.
Musashi did not say so, but John understood it within a week: a student in Japan did not pay his teacher in money.
He paid in work.
So before dawn he carried water.
The well was at the end of the lane, and Nagaoka’s kitchen needed twelve buckets a day, and John carried them on a pole across his shoulders, two at a time, six trips there and back.
The first morning he spilled half and was laughed at by the kitchen maid.
By the end of the month he spilled nothing and she had stopped laughing.
After the morning kata he split wood.
There was a stack of pine logs behind the kitchen as high as his head, and an axe with a handle worn smooth by other men’s hands, and Musashi made him split them in a particular way: one stroke, never two, the axe falling from above his head in the same line as the first cut of the first kata.
If a log needed two strokes, he had to put it aside and split it again the next morning, first, before any of the others.
“Why?” John asked Kiku, on the third day, with blisters on both palms the size of coins.
Kiku asked Musashi.
Musashi was sitting on the veranda eating a peach.
“He says the axe doesn’t care what you think.
Neither does the wood.
“He says it’s a better teacher than he is, and it works for nothing.”
In the afternoons, in the worst of the heat, he did nothing with a sword at all.
Musashi made him walk.
He walked up and down the yard, slowly, in a particular way, with his body low and his feet sliding over the ground as if on ice, his heels never quite lifting.
He walked for an hour at a time.
Musashi watched him from the veranda and said nothing, or said no, which meant he had let his weight come up.
“In my time,” John told Kiku one evening, when she came to the hut to give him the day’s words, “soldiers spend months learning to march before anyone gives them a rifle.
I used to think it was stupid.”
“And now?”
“Now I think it’s the only thing that kept some of them alive.”
* * *
He ate.
That was the other half of it.
He had never been so hungry in his life, not even in the trenches.
His body was being taken apart and put back together every day, and it wanted rice, and fish, and pickles, and more rice.
Nagaoka’s kitchen fed Musashi, and Musashi, without a word, fed John from his own share, a bowl of rice at noon and another at dusk.
In the evening at the hut, Ume fed him again.
He paid her by mending everything in the village that was broken: a cracked boat hull, a net winch whose ratchet had worn smooth, a rusted iron pot.
Sometimes he used his hands.
Sometimes, when no one was looking, he used the Turn.
He used the Hold only once that summer, and only to see whether it had changed.
It was in the seventh week, at night, in the hut, with everyone asleep.
He took Salai’s knife and dropped it, as he had in the first week, and pushed.
Four counts.
The cold in his fingers.
The warm wet on his lip.
The same as ever.
But this time he did something new.
He made himself move inside the Hold, as he had tried to on the beach, the way Musashi wanted him not to.
He reached for the falling knife at the speed of his thoughts, not the speed of his body.
Something in his elbow went hot and tight, a warning, like a rope about to part.
He stopped at once.
The knife hit the matting.
He sat in the dark rubbing his elbow and thought about it like an engineer.
The body can’t do it yet.
If I force it, it tears.
Musashi’s right: build the body first.
Then ask it.
He did not try again that summer.
He wrote it down in the back of Leonardo’s notebook, under the old Florentine readings, in English: Kokura, 7th wk.
Hold unchanged, 4 counts, same costs.
Tried to move fast inside it.
Elbow warned.
Not yet.
* * *
There was one thing he did use, that summer, every night.
Not the Hold.
The Branches.
He did not mean to.
But in the hut at night, lying on the matting with the family asleep around him, he would sometimes find Ume’s youngest girl curled against his side, as children curl against anything warm, and her small hand would be on his arm, and he would see her. Follow the newest chapters on novelping . com.
Not far.
A few days, a few weeks.
The girl on the beach with a crab in a bucket.
The girl sick with a cough, and Ume sitting up with her.
The girl laughing at something in the boat.
The cough worried him.
He saw it three nights running, a little stronger each time, the way the stair in Florence had grown stronger.
So on the fourth day he went to the old woman in the village who knew herbs and asked her, in his bad Japanese, what was good for a cough in a child.
She gave him a bundle of dried leaves and charged him a fish.
He gave the leaves to Ume and said only that in his country they were good to have in the house.
Ume looked at him strangely and put them on the shelf.
Eight days later, the girl began to cough.
Ume made the tea from the leaves without being told.
The cough lasted three nights instead of the ten he had seen, and then it was gone.
He never told anyone.
But after that, when Ume put the third bowl of rice in front of him at night, she would sometimes put her hand on his shoulder for a moment as she did it, the way she put her hand on her own sons’ shoulders, and say nothing.
* * *
By the middle of the sixth month he could follow most of what was said to him slowly, and say what he needed to say badly.
Kiku came less often to the yard.
She was busy.
Something was happening at the church, she said, letters from Nagasaki, and the Fathers were worried, and she did not want to talk about it.
When she did come, in the evenings, she was tired, and her questions were short.
“He still hits you every day?”
“Every day.”
“And you still get up?”
“Every day.”
“Good.” She looked at him in the lamplight of the hut, at the new hardness in his arms and the burned skin on the back of his neck.
“You don’t look like a foreigner any more from behind.
Only from the front.”
At the end of the sixth month, Musashi sent him to the smith.
“Iron bars,” Kiku translated.
“Three.
Each as heavy as three swords.
He has ordered them from Kaneshige in the lane below the river, and you are to fetch them, and you are to carry them back yourself, and you are not to drop them in the street, because if you drop them in the street Kaneshige will hear about it and laugh at both of you.”
The forge stood at the bottom of a steep lane where the river came down off the hills and ran over a stone weir below the town.
It was a low black building with smoke coming out of every crack in its roof.
Inside, in the red dark, a small old man with forearms like ship’s cables was hammering a strip of glowing steel on an anvil, and he did not look up when John came in.
“Musashi’s foreigner,” he said, between strokes, in a dry voice.
“I’ve heard about you.
They say you can mend a clock by looking at it.”
“Not by looking at it.”
The old man stopped hammering.
He put the steel back into the fire and turned round, and looked John up and down with small, sharp, red-rimmed eyes.
“Kaneshige,” he said.
“Your bars are by the door.
Take them and get out.
I don’t like foreigners and I don’t like magic.” He turned back to his fire.
“And tell your master that if he wants to use my iron for beating people, he can pay for it in advance.”
John picked up the bars.
They were very heavy.
He carried them up the lane on his shoulder, past the houses, past a tea shop where three men in rough travelling clothes with long swords were sitting on a bench outside, drinking.
One of them watched him go by.
He said something to the others, and they laughed, and one of them put down his cup and stood up.