The cherry tree at the little shrine above the river flowered on the twenty-sixth day of the second month, which John made the eighteenth of March 1613.
He knew because Tsuda came to Nagaoka’s gate that morning in a plain grey jacket with an oak sword over his shoulder and a branch of pink blossom tucked into his sash, as proof.
He came alone.
That was the first thing John noticed.
No friends from the castle school, no crowd behind him.
Just Tsuda, standing in the lane in the early sun, waiting to be let in.
Musashi let him in himself.
He opened the gate, looked at the young man for a moment, and stood aside, and then went and sat on the veranda with his arms folded like a man at a play.
“Here?” said John.
“In the yard?”
“Here,” said Tsuda.
“No sun.
No gravel.
No river.” He took the branch of blossom out of his sash and laid it carefully on the edge of the veranda.
“Just the two of us, on flat ground.
I want to know what you are when you have no tricks.”
John looked at him.
Tsuda had changed over the winter.
He was thinner.
His wrist, when he lifted his oak sword, moved freely, but he held the sword differently now: lower, looser, not in the great beautiful high guard of Kojiro’s school but in something plainer.
He had been working.
All winter, John thought, while I was in the snow with iron bars, he was somewhere else doing the same.
Good.
Then this will be honest.
He took off his jacket and folded it and put it on the veranda beside the blossom.
He picked up the long oak sword Musashi had made him, and held it in both hands, and walked out into the middle of the yard.
* * *
It lasted longer than the gravel.
Much longer.
Tsuda came at him carefully this time, testing.
A cut at the wrist.
A thrust at the throat.
A feint high that turned into a cut at the knee.
He was fast, and he was not watching John’s sword either.
He was watching John’s hips, as Musashi did.
He had learned that from somewhere over the winter, and John felt it, and for the first long minute of the fight neither of them touched the other at all.
The oak swords knocked together and came apart, knocked and came apart, with a sound like a woodpecker.
John did not hold.
He did not think about it.
He was watching Tsuda’s right shoulder again, out of habit, but Tsuda had learned to keep it still.
So John watched the whole of him instead, all at once, the way the snow had taught him to watch the yard, with his mind quiet on the riverbank and his body doing the work.
He saw it in the end in Tsuda’s back foot.
A small thing.
Before every big attack, Tsuda’s back heel lifted a hair off the ground, the way a runner’s heel lifts before he runs.
The next time it lifted, John was already moving.
He went in under the cut instead of away from it.
Tsuda’s oak came down past his left shoulder and he felt the wind of it.
His own sword was short in his hands, the hilt close to his body, and he turned his hips and drove the end of the hilt into Tsuda’s ribs, not hard, enough to stop the breath.
Tsuda gasped.
John stepped round him, and the oak came round in the fourth movement and stopped across the back of Tsuda’s neck, resting there, the wood cool on his skin.
Nobody moved for a moment.
Then Tsuda laughed.
It came out as a wheeze, because of his ribs, but it was a laugh.
“Again,” he said.
They did it again.
And again.
Five times, until the sun was well up over the wall and both of them were soaked through with sweat.
Tsuda touched John once, on the fourth bout, a good cut across the forearm that would have taken his hand off with steel.
John touched Tsuda four times.
At the end Tsuda lowered his sword, and bowed, deeply, and stayed down a long time.
“In the autumn I wanted to kill you,” he said, when he straightened up.
“All winter I trained to kill you.
I thought about it every morning.” He shook his head, still breathing hard.
“Now I want you to show me what you did with the hilt.”
Musashi spoke from the veranda for the first time.
“At dawn.
Bring your own rice.”
Tsuda turned and stared at him.
Musashi did not explain.
He got up and went inside.
So there were two of them in the yard, after that.
* * *
The petals came in the next spring, but John always remembered them as the turn of it, because that was when the trick came back.
There was an old cherry tree in the corner of the yard, and in the second spring, Musashi’s second at Kokura, it dropped its blossom in a single week of wind.
Musashi stood under it one morning and pointed at the petals coming down in the slant light, hundreds of them, turning.
“Now,” he said.
“Your trick.”
John pushed.
The petals stopped.
All of them, hanging in the air, pink-white, edge-on or flat to the light, like a cloud of tiny plates.
He’d done this so many times in the first weeks, the stillness, and sat in it, warm.
He knew the bath Musashi meant.
He didn’t sit in it.
He was already moving.
His body had gone into the first movement of the kata before the Hold had even finished settling, the groove taking his weight, and inside the slow world his ordinary-speed arms were very fast.
He cut.
He didn’t think about which petal.
His eyes had already seen all their paths and his body simply went where the paths crossed the line of the cut, one, two, five, eight, the oak passing through the slow air and touching each petal in turn as it went by.
He let go.
The petals came down at speed.
Eight of them fell straight, folded in half along a line.
His lip was dry.
He counted the cold in his fingers.
Only a little.
He looked up.
Musashi was watching him with his arms folded, and for the first time since the beach he had no expression on his face at all.
“How long?” he said.
In Japanese.
He’d learned to ask John that in a way he could understand.
“Long,” said John.
He thought.
He’d stopped counting Ave in Florence.
“Fifteen.
Maybe more.” Three had been all he had in the salt store.
He’d used it, this time, without sitting in it, and it had lasted nearly four times as long, and cost him less, because his body had done the work his mind used to do.
Musashi nodded.
Then he walked across and kicked him, hard, in the back of the knee he’d torn on the beach a year before.
John didn’t fall.
His feet went first.
They took him a pace sideways out of the kick before he’d even Held.
Musashi’s foot passed through air.
“Ah,” said Musashi.
It was the most praise John ever had from him.
* * *
Musashi did not let it rest there.
He never let anything rest.
That afternoon he took John down to the shingle below the fishing village, where the boats were drawn up, and filled his hands with pebbles.
He stood ten paces away and threw them, one at a time at first, then two, then a handful at once, underarm, high and low, at John’s face and chest and legs.
John stood with the short oak sword in his hand.
“Hold,” said Musashi.
“Then move.
Not one or the other.
Both.”
The first handful came in a spray, seven or eight pebbles turning in the air.
John pushed.
The beach went thick and the pebbles hung in a loose cloud in front of him, dark against the sea.
He did not stand and look at them.
He was already turning, his body already in the groove, and inside the slow world his ordinary arm was quick enough.
He knocked one aside, and a second, and stepped out of the line of a third, and let the rest go past him into the shingle.
He let go.
“How many?” said Musashi.
“Three hit.
I mean, I hit three.” He wiped his lip.
Dry.
“I let the others go.
They’d have missed.”
Musashi nodded slowly.
That was the point, John understood.
Not to stop everything.
To know, inside the Hold, which things mattered, and leave the rest.
They did it until the light went.
By the end John could take the five that would have hit him out of a handful of ten and leave the others, and the cost had settled to something he could measure: a coolness in the fingertips, a hunger at dusk that one extra bowl of rice would fill.
It was not nothing.
But it was a long way from the basement, where four counts had left him bleeding and shaking on the floor.
Gosuke’s children watched from the boats the whole afternoon.
When John walked back up past them, the smallest girl, the one who had asked him if his wrist hurt a year ago, held out her hand with a pebble in it.
“Again,” she said, gravely, in Japanese, like Musashi.
Musashi watched the girl go.
Then he said something to John that he did not say again for a long time.
“When you started, you held and saw everything and did nothing.
Now you hold and see everything and choose.” He picked up a pebble and turned it in his fingers.
“One day you won’t need to choose.
You’ll just know.
Then you’ll be better than me.”
He threw the pebble into the sea and walked up the beach.
* * *
He told Tsuda that evening, as much as he could tell anybody, sitting on the edge of the veranda with their feet in the cold yard and the blossom falling round them in the dusk.
“He let me use it today,” John said.
“My trick.
The thing I do.”
“The thing that made you so slow in the summer?” Tsuda had heard about the beach.
Everyone in Kokura had heard about the beach.
“Musashi forbade it.”
“Until today.
Until my body moved without being asked.” John looked at his hands.
The fingers were only a little cold.
“Now I can see more, for longer, and it costs me less.
Because I’m not standing still inside it any more.”
Tsuda thought about that.
He was cleverer than he had seemed at the gate, nearly a year ago.
He was cleverer than he let people see.
“Fifteen,” he said.
“That’s what you told him.”
“About that.”
“And how many will it be when you’re as good as him?” Tsuda smiled crookedly.
“Fifty?
A hundred?”
“I don’t know.”
“I do.” Tsuda stood up and stretched.
“It’ll be enough.
That’s what he’s waiting for.
You can see it in his face.
He’s waiting for the day it’s enough.” He picked up his oak sword and his branch of blossom, which had wilted in the sun on the veranda all day.
“Good night, foreigner.
Tomorrow at dawn, I’ll try to hit you again.”
He went out through the gate.
John sat on alone, watching the petals come down in the lantern light.
In the morning, when he came out into the yard, Musashi was already there.
He was not holding an oak sword.
He was holding a travelling hat of woven straw, and he had a pack on his back.
“In the fourth month,” he said, “I go on the road.
You’re coming.” He put the hat on John’s head.
It was too small.
“Until then, two swords.”