It had started to rain an hour before, the warm, heavy rain of the sixth month, and the lane up from the river was running with brown water.
The tea shop was a narrow wooden front with a cloth awning and a bench under it, and the three men on the bench were sheltering from the rain under the awning, with a jar of rice wine between them that was nearly empty.
They were ronin.
John knew that much by now.
Masterless samurai: men whose lords had been killed or ruined in the wars of the last twenty years, who still had the right to wear two swords and nothing else.
Some became teachers, or guards, or farmers.
Some drifted from town to town and drank and fought and sold their swords to whoever paid.
These three wore faded jackets and rough straw sandals, and their hair was badly tied, and their swords were good.
That was the thing John noticed.
Their clothes were poor and their swords were very good.
The one who had stood up was the biggest, a heavy man of about thirty with a scar across his chin.
He stepped out from under the awning into the rain and stood in the middle of the lane, so that John had to stop.
He said something.
John understood about half of it.
Foreigner.
Musashi.
Dog.
“I don’t understand,” said John, in his bad Japanese.
It was true enough.
The big man laughed and said it again, slower, louder, as Kiku did with new words.
This time John caught more of it.
Musashi’s dog.
Carrying Musashi’s iron.
Let’s see if the dog can bite.
The other two had stood up as well now, still under the awning, grinning.
One had his hand resting on the hilt of his long sword, the way a man rests his hand on a gate.
John stood in the rain with three iron bars on his right shoulder and thought it through.
He was not allowed to Hold.
Musashi had said so, and he had kept to it for ten weeks.
Even if he broke the rule, the Hold would give him four counts and show him everything and let him do almost nothing, and then he would have a bleeding nose and cold hands in front of three swordsmen.
No.
What did he have?
Ten weeks of kata.
Ten weeks of walking with his body low and his feet sliding.
Ten weeks of splitting logs with one stroke.
Three iron bars, each as heavy as three swords.
And the fact that these men were drunk, and thought he was a dog, and were standing in the rain on a lane running with mud.
They think I’m slow.
Everyone thinks I’m slow.
Good.
“Please,” he said in Japanese, and bowed, the way Kiku had taught him to bow to someone of higher rank, which was very low.
“Let me pass.”
The big man laughed again, delighted, and stepped forward and put his hand flat on John’s chest and pushed.
* * *
John let him.
He let the push take him back half a step, the way the axe fell by itself, and while he went back he let the iron bars slide off his shoulder.
He did not throw them.
He let them fall, and caught the end of one in his right hand as it went past, and it swung forward on its own.
It was like the axe.
That was what he remembered afterwards.
The bar came round low, heavy, in the same line as the fourth movement of the kata, the sweep, and he did not hurry it or force it.
He let it go where his body had been told ten thousand times to send it.
It hit the big man across both shins, just below the knee.
The big man’s legs went out from under him on the wet mud and he sat down in the lane with a sound like a dropped sack.
The second ronin already had his sword half drawn. Find the original chapter at g.com.
John did not wait for the rest.
He stepped in, low, the sliding step from the afternoons in the yard, and put the end of the iron bar into the man’s stomach, not hard, the way you would push a door.
The man folded over it.
John took his sword hand at the wrist with his left hand and turned it, as the sergeant in Glasgow had taught him in a trench, and the sword finished coming out of its scabbard and fell into the mud.
The third man had stayed under the awning.
He was the sober one, John realised.
He was older than the others, lean and grey, and he had not moved at all.
His hand was on his sword, but the sword was still in its scabbard.
For a moment they looked at each other through the rain.
John was standing over two men in the mud with an iron bar in his hand.
The big one was trying to get up and failing, holding his shins.
The second was on his knees, retching.
Both of them were still alive and would stay that way.
Their swords were in the mud, within his reach.
He could have finished it.
Two strokes with the bar.
The big man’s head was right there, and nobody in the lane would have stopped him.
The tea shop’s owner had vanished inside.
The rain had cleared the street.
He thought about it for exactly as long as it took to breathe in and out.
He was a foreigner in a Hosokawa town.
He was the guest of the guest of a senior retainer.
Three men had started a fight with him in the street, and nobody had seen it except the men themselves and the tea-shop keeper, who was hiding behind his own door.
If two of those three were dead in the mud, the magistrate would not ask who had pushed first.
He would ask what the foreigner was doing beating samurai to death with iron bars, and the answer would cost Musashi his host and Kiku her place and John his head.
Alive, they were three drunks who had been knocked down by a foreigner carrying iron, and that was a story none of them would want told.
Beaten is enough.
Beaten is better.
He bent and picked up the second man’s sword out of the mud by the blade, carefully, and held it out to the grey man under the awning, handle first.
The grey man looked at the sword.
Then at John.
Then he took his hand off his own hilt, and came out into the rain, and took the sword from him, and bowed.
Not deeply.
But he bowed.
He said something.
John did not understand all of it, but he understood drunk, and fools, and the word that meant excuse me.
Then the grey man hauled the big one up by the collar and the other by his arm, and the three of them went away down the lane towards the river, two of them limping, without looking back.
John picked up the three iron bars, put them on his shoulder, and carried them up the hill.
* * *
Musashi was on the veranda when he came into the yard, sitting cross-legged with his back against a post, watching the rain.
He looked at the iron bars, and at the mud on John’s legs to the knee, and at the scrape across his knuckles.
John put the bars down carefully on the veranda.
“Three men,” he said, in his bad Japanese, because Kiku was not there.
“At the tea shop.
Drunk.
Ronin.”
Musashi waited.
“I didn’t hold,” said John.
“No trick.
I used the bar.”
He knew enough of Musashi by now to expect nothing, and he got nothing.
Musashi looked at him for a while, and then he said several sentences, slowly.
John caught perhaps a third of it.
He caught drunk, and mud, and lucky, and at the end a phrase he had to ask Kiku about the next day.
A drunk man on wet ground is half beaten before you arrive.
Next time it will be a sober man on dry ground.'” She looked at him sideways.
“That’s what he said?”
“Yes.”
“Then he’s pleased,” said Kiku.
“How can you tell?”
“Because he talked to you for that long.” She smiled slightly.
“When he isn’t pleased, he says one word and walks away.”
* * *
But word got round.
In Kokura, word always got round.
By the end of the week the whole town knew that Musashi’s foreigner had knocked down two ronin in the lane by Kaneshige’s forge with an iron bar, and had handed the third man a sword out of the mud instead of killing him with it.
In the market, people still stared at him, but they stared differently.
The chestnut seller at the bridge sold him a bag at the ordinary price.
The children who followed him in the street kept a greater distance.
And on the eighth day after the fight, a man came to Nagaoka’s gate asking for John.
He was a minor official of the town magistrate, a thin, polite young man with a writing box under his arm.
He had heard, he said, that there had been some trouble with ronin in the lane by the river.
He wished only to record the facts.
Kiku came running from the church to translate, out of breath, and stood beside John in the gateway with her hands in her sleeves and her face very calm.
John told him the facts.
He told them plainly: the three men, the push, the bar, the swords in the mud.
The official wrote them down in quick brush strokes.
“And the third man?” he said, through Kiku.
“The one who did not fight?”
“He took his friends away.”
The official looked up from his writing.
“He has a name,” he said.
“He is called Hayashi Jinnai.
He was once a captain in the army of the Ukita family, who fought against the Shogun at Sekigahara and lost.
He is known in three provinces.
He has killed eleven men in duels.” He closed the writing box.
“He told the tea-shop keeper that the foreigner had given him back his friend’s sword.
He said that he had never been handed a sword by a man who had just won the right to keep it.”
He bowed to John, quite properly, and went away.
Kiku watched him go down the lane.
“That was a warning,” she said.
“From whom?”
“From the magistrate.
He wanted you to know that he knows your name now.
And that if anything happens to Hayashi Jinnai’s friends, he’ll know where to look.” She took a breath and let it out.
“And it was also a compliment.
From Hayashi.
Which in this town is much more dangerous.”
John thought about the grey man for a long time afterwards.
About the hand resting on the hilt, and the sword staying in its scabbard, and the bow in the rain.
Eleven men killed in duels, and he had stood under an awning and watched his friends knocked down in the mud and done nothing.
He was watching me, John thought.
The whole time.
He wanted to see what I’d do with the swords.
And he wondered what Hayashi Jinnai would have done if John had picked up the bar and finished it.
He thought he knew.
That evening Musashi did not hit him with oak.
He sat on the veranda while John did the kata alone, and when it was nearly dark, he called him over and pointed with his chin down the lane towards the river, where smoke was rising from the roof of Kaneshige’s forge.
“Tomorrow,” he said, “you work for the smith.”