Kokura castle stood on a rise above the river mouth, a tall white keep of four storeys with black-tiled roofs that curved up at the corners like the brims of hats.
Below it, the stone walls dropped in steep curved slopes to a wide moat of green water, where carp the size of dogs moved slowly under the surface.
John had seen it every day for six months from the town below.
He had never been inside the gate.
Nagaoka took him in himself, on the morning after the gravel, with Kiku following three paces behind.
They crossed the moat by a wooden bridge, passed through a gate with iron-studded doors, climbed a stone ramp that turned back on itself twice so that an enemy would be under the walls the whole way, and came through a second gate into a courtyard of raked white gravel.
Samurai stood at every doorway.
Every one of them looked at John and away again.
Lord Hosokawa Tadaoki received them in a room with a floor of fresh straw matting and painted sliding doors showing pine trees in snow.
He was about fifty, small and straight-backed, with a thin grey moustache and very quick eyes.
He sat on a slightly raised platform at the far end of the room with two retainers kneeling beside him.
John knelt where Nagaoka showed him, and bowed until his forehead almost touched the mat, and stayed there until he was told to sit up.
The lord looked at him for a long time without saying anything.
Then he spoke, in a light, dry voice, and Kiku, kneeling behind John, translated in a murmur.
“He asks how tall you are.”
John told him, in feet and inches, and then tried to work it out in Japanese measures, and failed.
Lord Tadaoki seemed to find this funny.
“He asks where you come from.”
“England,” said John.
“An island.
Like Japan.
On the far side of the world.”
The lord asked several questions about England.
They were sharp ones.
How many ships did its king have?
Did it trade with the Portuguese?
Were its people Christians, and if so, the same kind as the Fathers?
When John said that the English were Christians but of a different kind, who did not obey the Pope in Rome, the lord leaned forward slightly.
“He says that is very interesting,” Kiku murmured.
“He says there are Dutchmen at Hirado who say the same thing, and the Shogun likes them better for it.” She paused.
“He asks whether you came to Japan to make Christians.”
“No,” said John.
“I came to learn the sword.”
The lord looked at him for a while longer.
Then he asked about the gravel.
He had heard it all already, John could tell.
He wanted to hear it from John.
So John told it plainly: the sun, the loose stones, Tsuda’s shoulder, the stroke stopped at the temple.
When he had finished the lord was quiet, and then he said something that made both retainers glance at each other.
“He says,” said Kiku slowly, “that his late wife was a Christian.
She died twelve years ago rather than be taken as a hostage by his enemies.
He says she once told him that the Christian god asks men to spare their enemies, and that he told her this was the most foolish thing he had ever heard, because a spared enemy comes back.” She took a breath.
“He says: you spared Tsuda.
Tsuda will come back.
What will you do then?”
John thought about it before he answered.
“Spare him again,” he said, “if he comes back honestly.
And if he comes back in a lane at night with his friends, then not.”
Kiku translated.
The lord listened, and nodded once, as a merchant nods at a price that he can accept.
“He says you may stay in Kokura as Nagaoka’s guest,” Kiku said, “as long as Musashi stays.
He says you may not leave the province without permission.
And he says…” She hesitated, and went on in exactly the same voice.
“He says that the woman who translates for you is a Christian, and that she should be careful whom she is seen with, because the Shogun is watching all the lords in the west, and he is watching Lord Tadaoki more than most.”
The lord made a small gesture with his fan.
* * *
On the way down through the gates, Kiku did not say anything.
At the bottom of the stone ramp, in the shadow of the outer wall, she stopped and leaned against the stone for a moment with her eyes shut.
“He knew my name,” she said.
“He never said it.
But he knew it.”
“He was warning you.”
“He was protecting himself.
That’s the same thing, for a lord.” She opened her eyes.
“It’s all right.
It was kind, for him.
He could simply have had me sent to Nagasaki.” She straightened up and pulled her collar closed over the cord of the cross.
“Come.
You have wood to split.”
* * *
The winter came down in the tenth month.
It was not like a Florence winter, dry and blue.
It came off the sea in grey walls of wind and sleet and then in snow, real snow, a foot of it in the yard behind Nagaoka’s house.
The cherry tree stood black and bare.
The water butt froze every night.
Musashi did not care.
He met John in the yard at dawn as he always had, barefoot on the frozen earth, in a cotton jacket, and they did the nine kata with iron bars in the snow until the sun came up, and then they did them again.
John’s hands split.
His feet went numb and then burned.
He learned to wrap them in straw and rags, as the farmers did, and Musashi let him, after the first week, because a man with frozen feet could not feel the ground.
He did not hold all winter.
He did not need to.
He found that he did not want to.
Something was happening to him, and he could not have explained it to Leonardo or to Hartley, though both would have wanted it written down.
He had stopped thinking about the kata while he did them.
The movements went on by themselves, and his mind went somewhere quiet and stayed there, watching, as a man on a riverbank watches the water.
It was not like the Hold.
In the Hold his mind went fast and his body was slow.
Here his mind was slow, and his body was simply doing what it knew, at its own speed, which was getting faster.
And when Musashi came at him with oak, in the snow, John was hit less.
Not a great deal less.
Musashi was still Musashi.
But some mornings John stopped five blows out of ten, and once, in the eleventh month, on a morning so cold the air hurt, he stopped every blow of a whole exchange and Musashi stepped back and lowered his sword and looked at him.
“Who were you thinking about?” he said.
“Nobody.”
“Good,” said Musashi, and attacked him again, and hit him on the ear.
* * *
His Japanese came that winter too, all at once, as languages do after a long time of not coming.
He realised it one evening at Kaneshige’s table, when Haru said something to her husband about the price of charcoal, and Kaneshige answered, and John laughed at the answer before he had translated it in his head.
Haru looked at him in surprise.
Then she said something to him directly, a question about his mother, and he answered it, slowly but without stopping, and nobody had to help.
After that he talked to everyone.
He talked to Gosuke about nets and to the chestnut seller about chestnuts and to Taro, the silent apprentice, who turned out not to be silent at all, only shy, and who wanted to know whether it was true that in John’s country the women were taller than the men.
He talked to Musashi.
That was the strangest part.
Musashi, who had said so little to him through Kiku, turned out to have a great deal to say once there was nobody between them.
Not about the sword.
He talked in the evenings on the veranda, with a jar of warm rice wine between them and the snow falling in the lantern light, and John listened.
Once Musashi asked him about his war.
John told him.
Not all of it.
The mud, the guns, the wire.
The men who had gone over the top in lines into machine guns and been cut down in rows.
Musashi listened without moving.
“How many died?” he said.
“On the first day of one battle,” said John, “twenty thousand of ours.
In one morning.”
Musashi was silent for a long time.
“I was at Sekigahara,” he said finally.
“I was sixteen.
On the losing side.
Many men died there too, and I saw it, and afterwards I hid in a marsh for three days.” He poured more wine.
“But they died fighting men.
Not machines.” He looked at the snow.
“Your war sounds like a forge with men in it instead of iron.”
John did not answer that.
He did not need to.
* * *
Once, in the twelfth month, he used the Hold.
Only once, and for a good reason.
The ice on the moat had frozen thin and grey, and two of Gosuke’s boys had gone out on it after a ball.
John was crossing the bridge on his way to the forge when he heard the ice go, and the shout.
He was down the bank before he had decided anything.
The younger boy was in the black water to his chest, clawing at an edge that kept breaking.
John pushed.
Four counts, still.
Not more; he had not used it since the summer.
In four counts he lay flat on the ice, spread his weight, and got his hand round the boy’s wrist where it would be when it came up, the ghost of it a second ahead of the real one.
Then he let go, and pulled.
His nose bled all the way home.
Ume put the boy by the fire and John beside him and fed them both until neither could move.
* * *
Kiku came less and less that winter.
The letters from Nagasaki were worse, she said, when she came at all.
In Edo the Shogun’s men had found Christians among his own retainers and had them stripped of their rank.
In the cities he ruled directly, churches had been closed.
Here in Kokura nothing had happened yet, but the Fathers had begun to pack books into chests, just in case.
“And you?” John asked her, on the last night of the year, when the whole town was ringing bells for the New Year and the temples were full of people.
“I’m still here,” said Kiku.
“Ask me again in the spring.”
On the first morning of the new year, the third of February 1613 by John’s reckoning, Musashi gave him a gift.
It was a pair of oak swords, a long one and a short one, that he had carved himself over the winter in the evenings.
The long one was exactly the length of John’s arm from shoulder to fingertip.
The wood was dark and smooth and very hard.
“Two,” said Musashi.
“From now, two.”
“I can barely use one.”
“Then you’ll be very bad with two for a long time.” Musashi handed them over.
“Then good.”
That same afternoon a boy came to the gate from the castle with a folded note.
It was from Tsuda.
It said only that his wrist had healed, and that the cherry tree at the shrine above the river would flower in about seven weeks, and that he would come to Nagaoka’s yard on the first day it did.