On the thirteenth day of the fourth month, Musashi was late for his own death.
John stood on the beach at Kokura with Kiku and three hundred other people and watched the island. It was a still morning, the sea like pewter. A boat had taken Sasaki Kojiro out at the hour of the dragon, with his officials and his famous long sword, the one the woman from 2041 had described to Musashi to the inch. The boat had come back without him. On the island, a small figure in a red jacket walked up and down the sand.
An hour passed. Then most of another.
"He does this," Kiku said. She'd learned more about Musashi in six weeks than she wanted to. "He says the other man should have time to be angry."
"Does it work?"
"He's still alive."
Musashi's boat came out from the headland a little before noon, rowed by a boatman with his back bent. Musashi sat in the stern. Even from the beach John could see he was doing something with his hands, working at a piece of wood with a knife.
"The oar," said John.
Kiku looked at him.
"He's carving the spare oar," John said. "Into a sword. Longer than Kojiro's."
He didn't know how he knew. He'd read it in the woodcut book, probably, years ago, and forgotten. It came up now out of nowhere and sat in his mouth like a stone, and he watched the boat run up on the island's beach exactly as the story said, and Musashi jump down into the shallows with the wooden thing in his hand, and the red jacket come running down the sand with the long blade flashing as it cleared the scabbard, and the scabbard thrown away into the sea.
You've lost, Kojiro, John thought, because that was the line in the book. Why would a winner throw away his scabbard?
The two figures met at the water's edge. It was very quick. From the beach it looked like nothing, like two men passing in a street. Then the red jacket was lying on the sand and Musashi was walking back to the boat.
The crowd made a noise, a long low sound, not a cheer. Kiku crossed herself inside her sleeve. John found he'd been gripping the gold coin in his pocket so hard the rim had cut his palm.
He'd known exactly how it would go, and it had gone exactly that way. And he'd still not been able to breathe.
* * *
Musashi came to the house that evening with blood on his sandals and didn't mention the island at all.
"Kata," he said. Kiku wasn't there. By then John had enough Japanese for kata, again, no, stupid, rice, wrong foot and better, which Musashi didn't say very often, and Kiku came only when there were things to be explained in words, which Musashi liked to keep to a minimum.
The kata were the whole of it. Musashi had decided on the first morning that there was nothing to be done with John's body except replace it, slowly, with a different one. So they did the same nine movements every dawn in the yard of the borrowed house, a thousand times, until John's arms shook and his calluses split and the house's old servant stopped watching from the kitchen out of pity. They did them at noon in the heat. They did them at night by a lantern. They did them with oak swords, and then with iron bars the weight of three swords, and then with nothing in his hands at all.
He wasn't allowed to Hold.
That was the rule from the first week. Musashi had made Kiku translate it carefully. "He says, when you do your trick, you see. That's good. But then you sit inside your seeing like a man in a bath. You're warm and comfortable and you look at everything, and when it's over you have done nothing. So: no trick until your body moves without being asked. Then we'll see what the trick is for."
So he didn't Hold. For six weeks, and then for ten, he simply moved, with his ordinary slow body, and was hit with oak, and got up.
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 weight 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 petals came in the next spring, but John always remembered them as the middle 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 in a year 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." Four 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.
* * *
The trial at the shrine came in the autumn, after the rains.
Kiku came with them for it, because Musashi wanted the rules explained exactly. It was a small Hachiman shrine in the hills behind Kokura, up a long stair of mossy stone between cedars, with a torii at the bottom and a bell at the top on a frame, an old bronze bell with a crack down one side. The priest was an old man who owed Musashi something and did not ask what the foreigner was for.
"From the torii to the bell," Kiku said, "in the dark. There are no lanterns. He has brought four men who will be among the trees with oak swords. They are not his students, he has none. They are men he has fought and not killed. They want very much to hit you, because you are a foreigner and because he has told them that if anyone hits you he'll pay them a month's rice." She listened. "If they hit you, you go back to the torii and start again. If you reach the bell and ring it, you have passed."
"And if I don't reach it by morning?"
Kiku asked. Musashi shrugged.
"He says, then you'll be a farmer with a hawk's eyes for the rest of your life, and you should go and fall into the sea somewhere else."
The stair was a hundred and twelve steps. John counted them later, in daylight, sitting on them with his ribs strapped.
He went up the first time and was hit on the fortieth step, on the forearm, from behind a cedar he hadn't seen at all. He went down and up again and was hit on the sixty-first. Then on the thirtieth, from the front, by a man he'd seen and Held for and simply been too tired to step away from.
You're in the bath again, he told himself on the walk down. You're looking. Stop looking.
The fourth time, he didn't Hold until he heard them.
He went up in the dark with his eyes half shut, listening. Cedar needles. The stream somewhere to the left. His own breath. And then, on the fifty-second step, a scrape of straw sandal on moss above him and to the right, and he pushed, and the dark went thick, and he didn't look for the man. He let his body go into the groove. Up and left, the oak coming round in his hands into the space where the sound was, and the Hold let go, and there was a crack and a grunt and a man sitting down hard among the ferns.
Two more on the stair. One he heard, one he only felt as a change in the air on the side of his face, and both times his feet were moving before the Hold was even full. The fourth man was waiting at the very top, under the bell frame, and he was the best of them, and he hit John across the ribs with a cut John saw coming for nine full seconds and still couldn't quite get away from, because he was out of breath and out of heat and his body was simply finished.
It was a good hit. It cracked a rib.
John went down on one knee on the top step. He could see the bell above him, black against the stars. The man was bringing the oak round for a second blow, laughing.
John pushed one more time, with nothing left. Not into the world. Into the oak in the man's hands. The Turn, the thing he hadn't used since the salt store.
The oak went grey and dry and split along its grain in the man's fists, a year, ten, fifty, a hundred years of weather in one breath, and the man was holding two halves of a rotten stick, and staring at them.
John got up, and took the bell rope, and rang it.
* * *
Musashi was sitting on the shrine steps when John came down at dawn with Kiku helping him. He'd watched it all from the top. He looked at John's strapped ribs, and the blood dried on his lip, and his blue fingers. Then he looked at the split oak sword, which he'd picked up from under the bell frame.
He said something to Kiku. She listened, and frowned, and asked him to say it again.
"He says you passed," she said. "And you cheated, with the stick. He says he doesn't mind, because a man who wins is a man who wins. But..." She hesitated. "He says the trick with the stick cost you more than all the rest of the night together. He saw your face. And your eyes, when you were on your knee and looking up at the bell. He says they went everywhere. Like a dog in a market. Too many things at once."
"The Branches," said John. He couldn't explain that to her. "When I'm tired, I see too much."
Musashi listened to that, as much as Kiku could make of it. Then he stood, and went up the last of the steps to the bell, and laid his hand on the crack in its side.
"He says," said Kiku, "the priest wants to melt this one. It's three hundred years old and it rang the hours for this valley all that time and now it's cracked and sounds like a sick cow." She listened. "He says he'll buy it. He says your eyes need a cage, and this bronze has been keeping time longer than anyone in Kokura has been alive."