They left Kokura in the fourth month of 1613, at the end of May by John’s count, with a travel pass from Nagaoka Sado folded in John’s sleeve and the permission of Lord Tadaoki to be absent from the province until the autumn rains.
Musashi travelled light.
A straw hat, a cotton jacket, a pack with a change of clothes and a block of ink and a brush.
His two swords.
A bag of rice.
John carried the same, and the two oak swords Musashi had made him, and, for the first time, steel: a short sword, a wakizashi, plain, with a black scabbard and a worn grip, that Kaneshige had made thirty years ago and taken back from a dead man’s family in payment of a debt.
Kaneshige had given it to John the night before they left without any ceremony at all.
“It’s a bad sword,” he said.
“Too heavy at the tip.
You won’t break it.” He held it out.
“On the road there are men who don’t care about oak.”
They walked east along the coast road and then inland into the hills of Buzen, following no plan that John could see.
Musashi went where he wanted.
He stopped in a town for three days because he liked the way the river ran through it.
He walked twenty miles out of his way to see a waterfall a farmer had told him about, sat in front of it for an afternoon, and walked back.
He slept in temples and in farmhouses and twice under trees.
He paid for nothing that he could get by doing a day’s work, and John learned to thatch a roof, plant rice in a flooded paddy with mud to the knee, and mend a waterwheel, which he did very well and was paid for in eggs.
And in every town of any size, Musashi found the best swordsman, and fought him.
* * *
It was always the same, and it was never the same.
Musashi would arrive.
Within a day the town would know who he was.
The local master, the man who taught the sons of the local samurai in a hall behind the magistrate’s house, would hear that the man who had killed Sasaki Kojiro had come, and would have to decide what to do.
Some of them came to the inn to ask for a bout.
Some of them sent their students to ask for them.
Some of them left town on urgent business.
Musashi fought the ones who asked.
Always with oak.
He did not kill any of them that summer.
He did not need to.
He beat them, usually in one exchange, sometimes in two, in their own halls in front of their own students, and then he bowed to them and thanked them, and the next morning he was gone.
“Why?” John asked him, on the road out of a town called Nakatsu, where Musashi had beaten a master of fifty in front of thirty students in a single stroke.
“You don’t need to prove anything.
Everyone knows who you are.”
Musashi walked for a while before he answered.
“Every man fights differently,” he said.
“Every man has one thing he does that nobody else does.
Usually only one.
I want to see it.” He glanced at John from under his hat.
“You should watch for it too.
You’re very good at watching.”
John watched.
And in the third town, at the master’s request, he fought.
He fought a student, not the master.
That was understood.
The master of the hall at Hita, a heavy, polite man called Ōishi, was not going to cross swords with Musashi’s foreigner and risk losing to him in front of his own people.
So he put up his best student instead, a tall boy of twenty, with oak swords on the polished floor of the hall in front of sixty people.
It was not like the gravel.
There were no tricks of sun or ground.
It was simply two men on a flat floor, and the tall boy was good, and John beat him in four exchanges with a cut to the forearm that the boy did not see coming.
He did not hold.
He did not need to.
Afterwards, on the road, Musashi said nothing for a long time.
“You watched his eyes,” he said at last.
“His eyes went to where he wanted to cut, every time.
A moment before he cut.”
It was the grunt that meant yes.
* * *
The bandits were in the hills above Hita, in the sixth month, in the heat.
There had been talk of them in the town.
A gang of eight or ten men, ronin or deserters or farmers gone bad, it was hard to say, who had been robbing travellers on the mountain road and burning farms.
The magistrate had sent men after them twice and lost two of his own.
Musashi heard the talk and said nothing, but the next morning he took the mountain road, and John followed him.
They found the farm in the afternoon.
It stood in a narrow valley below the road, a thatched house and a barn and three small terraced paddies, and smoke was coming out of the barn, not the house.
John saw it first.
He stopped on the road and looked down and counted: four men in the yard, with swords.
A fifth by the barn with a torch.
And in the middle of the yard, on their knees, a farmer and his wife and an old woman, and a boy of about six, and a girl a little older.
The men had found something in the house.
One of them was holding up a string of coins and laughing.
Another had his sword drawn and was standing over the farmer, who was bent forward with his forehead in the dirt, begging.
“Five,” said John quietly.
“Six,” said Musashi.
“One in the house.
Listen.”
John listened.
There was a crash from inside the house, of a chest being turned over.
Musashi took off his hat and laid it on the stone wall beside the road.
He did not hurry.
He loosened his long sword in its scabbard and stepped off the road onto the slope that went down to the farm.
“These ones,” he said, “are not oak.”
* * *
They went down the slope fast and quiet, through the rice terraces, and they were in the yard before the men had properly seen them.
What happened then took less time than it takes to tell.
John went to the left, towards the man standing over the farmer, because he was nearest and because his sword was drawn.
Musashi went right.
John heard steel clear its scabbard behind him and a short sound, and a man fell, and then another.
The man over the farmer turned.
He saw John coming, a tall foreigner with a short sword, and his face went from surprise to fury, and he did not attack John.
He swung round, with the whole of his body, to bring his sword down on the nearest thing he could reach, which was the little boy kneeling beside his father.
John pushed.
The yard went thick and slow.
The man’s sword hung in the air at the top of its arc, the light running along it.
The boy was looking up at it with his mouth open.
The farmer had lifted his head from the dirt.
Behind John, frozen, Musashi was in the middle of a cut, and a man in front of him was falling, very slowly, like a tree.
John did not stop to look.
That was what the petals had taught him.
He was already moving, his body in the groove, three steps across the dirt in the slow world.
He reached the man at the eighth count.
The man’s arms were above his head with the sword, and the whole of his right side under the arm was open.
He could have struck the sword aside.
He thought of it, and decided against it in the same moment.
Struck aside, the sword would fall on someone else, and the man would still be standing, with a second chance at the child.
No.
Finish it.
He put the short sword into the open place under the man’s arm, between the ribs, hard, the way the sergeant at Étaples had taught him with a bayonet, and pulled it out.
He let go of the Hold.
The man’s sword came down, but there was nothing in his arms any more to drive it, and it fell out of his hands and hit the ground a yard from the boy.
The man took one step sideways and sat down in the dirt, and then lay down, and did not get up.
It was over very quickly after that.
Musashi had killed three.
The man with the torch had dropped it and run, and Musashi let him run.
The one in the house came out with a bundle of the family’s clothes in his arms and saw what was in the yard and dropped the bundle and went down on his knees with his hands up.
Musashi looked at him for a moment and then turned his back on him and went to see to the barn, which was burning.
John stood in the yard holding the short sword.
There was blood on it to the hilt and on his hand to the wrist.
The boy was staring at him.
The farmer’s wife had both children in her arms and was making a thin high sound without stopping.
He had killed men before.
In France, in the trenches, at night, in a raid on a German sap at Messines in 1917, with a rifle at a distance and once with a bayonet close up.
He knew what it felt like afterwards.
This felt the same, and he had expected it to.
His hands were steady.
He was cold, and hungry, and the Hold had cost him a little more than on the beach, because he had pushed his body hard inside it.
That was all.
He wiped the sword on the dead man’s jacket, as he had been taught, and put it back in its scabbard.
The kneeling bandit in the doorway was watching him.
He was perhaps eighteen, thin, with a farmer’s hands.
He was weeping.
“Do you want him?” said John, to Musashi, who had come back from the barn with his sleeves smoking.
Musashi looked at the boy.
Then at John.
“Do you?”
John thought it through, quickly and honestly.
The boy had his hands up and had dropped the bundle.
He had been in the house, not in the yard.
He had not raised a sword to anyone that John had seen.
Killed, he was one more body for the magistrate.
Alive and tied, he was a witness who could tell the magistrate where the rest of the gang was camped and who led them, which might save the next farm.
“Alive,” said John.
“He’ll talk.
The magistrate needs him more than we need him dead.”
Musashi nodded once, as if John had passed something.
They tied the boy with the rope from the well, and the farmer, who had stopped shaking, brought them water.
* * *
On the walk back down to Hita with the bandit between them, Musashi said only one thing.
“The man at the child,” he said.
“You held.”
“Yes.”
“How long?”
“Eight.
Perhaps nine.” John looked at his hand, which still had blood in the creases of the knuckles.
“Long enough to decide.”
Musashi walked on in silence.
Then he said, not looking at John: “Good.
That’s what it’s for.
Not for looking.
For deciding.” He was quiet again for a while.
“In the autumn, when we’re home, there’s a shrine in the hills.
I’ll take you there.
If you pass what happens at the shrine, I’ll stop teaching you how to use a sword.”
“And teach me what instead?”
Musashi looked at him from under his straw hat.
“How to use the trick,” he said.