Kaneshige’s forge was dark even at noon.
It was a single long room with a floor of beaten earth, black with a hundred years of soot.
At one end stood the hearth, a low trough of clay and stone with a bed of glowing charcoal in it, and beside it the bellows: a long wooden box as high as a man’s waist, with a handle sticking out of one end that pushed a piston in and out.
Every time the piston moved, air roared into the fire and the charcoal went from red to yellow.
Next to the hearth stood the anvil, a block of iron on a cut tree stump, and next to that the quenching trough, a long wooden tub of water gone grey with scale.
Tools hung on the walls in rows: tongs, hammers, chisels, files.
The air smelled of hot iron and charcoal smoke and wet clay.
Kaneshige worked there with one apprentice, a silent boy of fifteen called Taro, and his wife, Haru, who did the accounts and cooked and was the only person in the world he was afraid of.
“Musashi says you’ll work,” Kaneshige said, on the first morning, without stopping what he was doing.
He was drawing out a bar of steel on the anvil, turning it a quarter turn after every three blows.
“I don’t want you.
I said so.
He said you’d work for nothing, and I can’t say no to nothing.” He pointed with his chin at the bellows.
“Push.
Steady.
Don’t stop until I tell you.”
John pushed.
He pushed for most of the first week.
It was the hardest work he had done in Japan.
The piston was heavy, and the fire wanted it steady, the same stroke, the same speed, for hours, and if he slowed down Kaneshige noticed without looking round and said more, and if he pushed too hard the fire went white and Kaneshige said a word John had not been taught.
At night his shoulders burned and his back ached from a new place.
But he was watching.
He watched everything Kaneshige did.
And by the end of the week he understood, as an engineer, what the old man was doing, and how extraordinary it was.
* * *
Kaneshige made swords out of sand.
That was not quite true, but it was close.
The iron came from the hills, where men dug black iron sand out of the riverbanks and smelted it in great clay furnaces for three days and nights.
What came out was a lump of metal called tamahagane, rough and uneven, some parts soft and some parts hard.
Kaneshige broke it into pieces with a hammer.
He looked at each piece.
He sorted them into piles by how they broke and how they shone, the hard bright ones in one pile, the soft dull ones in another, without ever saying how he knew.
Then he heated the hard ones, and beat them, and folded them over, and beat them again, folding the steel on itself again and again, twelve or fifteen times, until the bar was made of thousands of thin layers.
The soft steel went inside.
The hard steel went outside, wrapped round it.
Then he shaped the blade, and coated it in clay, thick along the back and thin along the edge, and heated it again, and plunged it into the water.
“Why the clay?” John asked, on the eighth day.
He could ask it in Japanese now, badly.
Kaneshige looked at him, surprised to be asked anything.
“So the edge cools fast and the back cools slow,” he said.
“The fast part goes hard.
The slow part stays soft.
A hard edge cuts.
A soft back bends and doesn’t break.” He shrugged.
“Everyone knows that.”
“Not where I come from.”
“Then where you come from, they make bad swords.”
John thought about what he knew, which was a great deal, and almost none of it useful in a forge without instruments.
He knew that steel was iron with a little carbon in it.
He knew that the hardness came from what happened to the carbon when the steel was cooled suddenly from a particular heat.
He knew that the heat had to be exactly right: too cool and the steel would not harden, too hot and the grain would grow coarse and the blade would be brittle.
He knew there was a word for the change, and a temperature, about seven hundred and fifty degrees on the centigrade scale.
Kaneshige knew it too.
He did not know the words or the numbers. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
He knew it by colour.
He heated a blade until it glowed a particular shade of red, the colour of a persimmon at dusk, he said, and then he quenched it.
To see the colour properly he worked in the dark.
He did his hardening at night, by the light of the fire alone.
“And if you’re wrong?” John asked.
“I’m not wrong.”
“But if you were?”
Kaneshige stopped and looked at him for a long time.
“Then the blade cracks in the water,” he said.
“Or it comes out soft, and bends the first time a man uses it, and he dies, and his family curses my name.” He went back to his anvil.
“One in five, when I was young.
One in twenty now.
I’m sixty-one.
I’ll be dead before I get it to one in fifty.”
* * *
It was the lodestone that changed things.
John found it on a shelf at the back of the forge, a lump of grey stone the size of a fist with iron filings stuck to it like fur.
Haru used it to pick up nails from the floor.
He held it in his hand for a long time.
Then he went to Kaneshige and asked, with Kiku’s help that evening because he did not have the words, whether he might show him something.
Kaneshige was suspicious.
Kiku told him it would cost nothing and take a quarter of an hour, and that if it was stupid, he could laugh at the foreigner, which he would enjoy.
Kaneshige agreed to that.
John took a short bar of steel from the scrap pile, a broken piece of a blade, and hung the lodestone on a string from a beam above the hearth so it dangled a hand’s width away from the edge of the fire.
He touched the cold steel to the lodestone.
It stuck.
Everyone could see it stick.
Then he put the steel in the fire, with the tongs, and Taro pumped the bellows, and they waited.
The steel went red.
Then a brighter red.
Every few moments John drew it out and touched it to the dangling lodestone.
It stuck.
And stuck.
And then, at one moment, it did not stick.
It hung beside the lodestone as if the stone were wood.
“Now,” said John.
“Look at the colour.”
Kaneshige looked.
He looked at the steel in the tongs for a long moment, at the colour of it in the dark forge.
“Persimmon,” he said.
“Every time,” said John, through Kiku.
“At the moment the stone stops wanting the iron, the steel is ready.
It’s the same heat every time, whatever the weather, whatever the light, whether you’re tired or not.
You don’t have to see the colour.
The stone sees it for you.”
Kaneshige did not answer.
He took the tongs from John and put the steel back in the fire himself, and drew it out, and touched it to the stone, again and again, a dozen times, his face red in the glow.
Every time it stopped sticking, he looked at the colour.
Every time, it was the same.
At last he quenched the bar in the trough, and the water hissed, and he stood holding the tongs over the steam.
“Who taught you this?” he said.
“In France.”
“I’ve never heard of him.”
“He’s not born yet,” said John, which he said in English, and Kiku did not translate.
* * *
Kaneshige did not thank him.
That was not his way.
But the next morning, when John arrived at the forge, he was not sent to the bellows.
Kaneshige handed him a hammer.
“Taro will push,” he said.
“You’ll strike.
When I point, you hit there.
When I say stop, you stop.
If you hit where I don’t point, I’ll put your hand in the fire.”
So John became a striker.
He stood across the anvil from Kaneshige with a heavy hammer, and when the old man touched a place on the glowing bar with his own small hammer, John brought the big one down on that place, and they worked in a rhythm, tap, crash, tap, crash, for hours, the sparks flying round their legs.
It was like the kata.
The same movement, again and again, until his body did it without being asked.
He found that he could read Kaneshige’s hammer before it touched the steel.
He did not need the Hold for it.
He watched the old man’s wrist and shoulder and the angle of his head, and he knew where the next tap would land a moment before it did, and his own hammer was already on its way.
By the end of the second week Kaneshige had stopped pointing at all.
He simply worked, and John’s hammer came down where it was needed.
“Musashi’s taught you something,” Kaneshige said, at the end of one long afternoon, wiping his face with a rag.
“You watch a man’s shoulder.
Not his hand.”
“The hand lies,” said John.
It was a thing Musashi said.
“Hm.” Kaneshige threw the rag in the corner.
“Haru says you’re to eat with us tonight.
Don’t argue.
She doesn’t like it when people argue.”
And slowly the body began to change.
It got harder and it got quicker, but that wasn’t the main thing.
The main thing was that it began to start moving before he’d decided to move.
He’d see Musashi’s hip turn and his own feet would already be going, not because he’d thought left, but because there was now a groove worn in him by a thousand mornings, and his body simply ran down it like water.
“Better,” said Musashi, in the eleventh week, and went inside without another word, and John stood in the yard with his oak sword and felt happier than he’d been since Florence.
* * *
The other change was in the yard, and it was Musashi who noticed it.
One morning in the eleventh week, at the end of the dawn kata, Musashi stood in front of him with the oak sword lowered and did not attack.
He simply stood there, watching John’s feet.
Then he lifted his own sword an inch, the start of a cut, nothing more, a feint so small that a stranger would not have seen it.
John was already a pace to the left.
He had not decided to go.
He had not held.
He had not even, as far as he could tell, seen the feint.
His feet had seen it, and gone.
Musashi lowered his sword again.
He looked at John’s feet for a long time, as Kaneshige looked at a blade fresh from the quench.
That evening, at Kaneshige’s table, Haru set down a second pot of rice beside John’s bowl without a word.
Kaneshige saw it and grunted.
Nobody mentioned it, then or afterwards.
But from that night on, the second pot was always there.