He came out of the dark into water again, and this time it was the sea.
Cold, black, salt, and a wave on top of him before he knew which way was up. He went under and came up and went under, and the Step-sickness took his legs at the knee so they didn't kick properly, and for a long few seconds he thought, quite clearly, this is a stupid way to die after all that. Then his hand hit sand. He crawled. A second wave picked him up and threw him onto a beach and left him there, coughing salt, in a grey dawn with snow on the hills above him.
Pines. Black rocks. A fishing boat pulled up on rollers, with a painted eye on the bow. And far out on the water, a low island, flat as a hat brim, with a few trees on it.
He knew that island. He'd seen it in a book of woodcuts in Hartley's library, the winter before the war, when he was nineteen and still reading for pleasure. Funashima, the caption had said, called Ganryujima.
Japan, he thought. Oh, God. I don't speak a word.
Then the fever came up over him like the tide, and he stopped thinking.
* * *
He was three days on the floor of a fisherman's hut. He remembered very little of it: a woman's hard hand under his head, a bowl of something hot and grey, children staring round a doorpost, and every so often a man who wasn't the fisherman standing over him in the doorway with his arms folded, looking.
On the fourth day he woke clear. The fisherman's wife was gone. In her place, kneeling on the matting by the brazier with her hands in her sleeves, was a young woman in a plain dark kimono with a small wooden cross on a cord round her neck, half hidden in the collar.
"You speak Portuguese?" she said, in Portuguese.
"No," said John, in Italian. "Some Latin. Italian."
She thought about it. "Slowly, then," she said, in an Italian made of Portuguese and Latin and stubbornness, and it turned out that if they both spoke very slowly and used their hands they could understand each other about two words in three. "I am Maria Kiku. I work for the Fathers at the church in Kokura. I talk for them, to the people, and for the people, to them." She looked at his wrist. "The fisherman found you. He went for the Fathers, because you are a foreigner. The Fathers sent me. And someone else came by himself."
She looked at the doorway. The man was standing in it again.
He was about thirty, not tall, but broad through the chest and very still, with his hair pulled back roughly and tied, a beard of a few days, and clothes that hadn't been washed in some time. He wore two swords. His hands were large and quite relaxed. He looked at John the way a farmer looks at a horse he's been told is fast.
He said something. Kiku translated it, slowly, and then said it again, as if she didn't quite believe it.
"He says: so you are the man who falls out of the sea."
* * *
His name was Miyamoto Musashi. He said it as if it ought to mean something, and when it obviously did, from John's face, he seemed neither surprised nor pleased.
They sat in the fisherman's hut with the brazier between them, and Kiku in the middle, and the fisherman's children listening outside the paper wall, and Musashi talked. He talked in short pieces and waited for each one to be put into Kiku's strange Italian before he went on, and he watched John while she did it.
"In the winter," Kiku said, "a woman came to him. A foreign woman. Not Portuguese, not Spanish. Taller than him. With short hair, like a man's, and clothes like no one's. She came to the house where he is staying, at night, past the guards, and they didn't see her."
John's mouth had gone dry.
"She knew his name. She knew he will fight Sasaki Kojiro on the island, in the fourth month. She knew what weapon Kojiro would bring and how long it would be. She said..." Kiku stopped. Musashi said something sharp, and she went on. "She said that in the spring, a foreigner would come out of the sea on this beach, with a little clock tied on his wrist. And she said..."
"Go on."
"She said he should kill you. While you are sick. Before you wake." Kiku's face was very still. "She said you will do great harm, in many places, for a long time. She gave him money. Gold."
Musashi reached into his robe and took out a coin and put it on the matting between them.
John picked it up.
It was gold, heavy, thick as a florin, and new, the edges sharp. On one side was a pattern of lines like the rings of a tree, very fine, almost a fingerprint. On the other side was a number pressed small into the rim. 2041.
He put it down.
"Why didn't you?" he said. "Kill me."
Kiku asked. Musashi laughed, short, through his nose, and answered.
"He says he doesn't kill for women he doesn't know. And he says that a man who walks past guards is a man who has a reason for not doing her own killing, and he wanted to know what it is." Kiku hesitated. "And he says: also, he was curious. He has fought sixty men. All the same. He wanted to see one who was not the same."
* * *
They went out onto the beach in the afternoon, when John could stand.
Musashi had two practice swords of oak in a cloth. He gave one to John and kept one, and walked out onto the wet sand below the tide line, and turned, and waited. Kiku stayed up by the boats with her arms folded inside her sleeves and her cross hidden. The fisherman's children sat on the rollers like birds on a wire.
"He says, come," said Kiku.
John had held a bayonet. He'd been taught to stick a sack of straw at Étaples by a sergeant who screamed. He'd never held a sword in his life. He gripped the oak in both hands, the way he'd seen it in woodcuts, and stood there, and felt like a fool.
Musashi came.
John pushed.
The beach went thick. The waves stopped mid-curl. Musashi's sword was coming down at his head in a long, slow, honest arc, and John watched it, and had all the time in the world to see where it would land, and to decide to step left, and to start to step.
His body started to step. His body, which was a lab assistant's body on its fourth day out of fever, moved exactly as fast as it always moved. He was halfway into the step when the arc changed.
It didn't change much. A turn of the wrists, half a hand. Musashi had seen his weight go, and simply followed it.
The world came back on four, and the oak hit John across the left shoulder hard enough to put him on his knees in the surf.
He knelt there with the sea round his legs and his shoulder screaming, and blood on his lip, and the cold coming into his fingers. Musashi stood over him. He didn't look triumphant. He looked interested.
He said something, quite long.
Kiku came down the beach to hear it. "He says you saw it," she said. "He says he watched your eyes, and you saw the cut before he made it, the whole of it, like a man who has seen it already. He has never seen eyes do that." She listened again. "But you move late. Your eyes are a samurai's. Your body is a farmer's. And because your eyes see so early, your body thinks it has time, and is lazy." Musashi said something else and she nearly smiled. "He says it's the worst combination he has ever seen. Like a hawk tied to a pig."
"Thank you," said John, from the surf.
"Again," said Musashi, in Japanese, and John understood that word without help.
* * *
They did it nine times. Nine times John Held, and saw, and moved, and was too slow, and was hit: the shoulder, the ribs, the wrist, the side of the head, a cut to the thigh that would have taken his leg off with steel. On the fifth time he tried to cheat, to push his body faster inside the Hold the way he'd done once in the basement, and felt something in the back of his knee tear like wet paper, and fell before the oak even reached him.
On the ninth he didn't Hold at all. He just watched, with his ordinary eyes, and got hit anyway.
When it was dark Musashi stopped. He picked up the oak sword from where John had dropped it and wiped the sand off both of them with the cloth and wrapped them. John lay on his back on the beach and looked at the first stars and shook with cold and hunger and couldn't stop.
Musashi crouched beside him. He spoke for a long time, slowly, with pauses, and Kiku sat on John's other side and gave it to him in pieces.
"He says the woman told him a thing she didn't mean to. She said you will do great harm in many places. So you will live a long time, and go to many places, and you will need to fight in all of them. And you can't fight." Kiku listened. "He says he is going to the island in the fourth month to kill Kojiro or be killed. If he lives, he will be bored after, because he always is. He says you are the least boring thing to happen to him in ten years."
"Is he offering to teach me?"
Kiku asked. Musashi looked out at the island on the black water. He didn't answer for a long time.
"He says," Kiku said finally, "that he doesn't teach. He has never had a student. Students want to know things in words." Musashi said one more thing, and stood up, and walked away up the beach towards the town without looking back. "He says: but you don't have words here anyway. So come to the house in the morning. Early. Bring your own rice."
* * *
Kiku helped him back to the hut. He leaned on her more than he wanted to. At the door she stopped and looked up at him in the light of the fisherman's lamp.
"The woman," she said. "With the gold from the future. She is real?"
"Yes."
"She wants you dead."
"It seems so."
"And she can walk past guards."
"It seems so."
Kiku nodded slowly, as if adding up a bill. "The governor of this province," she said, "has just been told by the Shogun in Edo that the Christian faith is forbidden in his lands. The Fathers are packing. I'm a Christian, and I talk for foreigners, and now I am talking for the strangest foreigner in Japan, who has an enemy who walks through walls." She almost smiled. "I should go home to my mother in Nagasaki."
"Probably."
"Yes. Probably." She pushed the door open for him. "I'll come to Musashi's house tomorrow too. Someone has to tell you when he's insulting you."
In the night, on the fisherman's floor, John lay with his shoulder and his knee and his ribs throbbing in turn like a chime of bells, and held the gold coin in his fist, and thought about a woman who had come to this beach before him and known exactly where he'd land.
He hadn't known himself. He'd only drifted. He'd followed a noise.
So she can see where I'll go, he thought, before I can.
He opened his hand and looked at the coin in the last of the brazier light. The fine lines on its face weren't rings of a tree, he saw now. They were too regular. They were a diagram, very small: a coil wound round a spindle, the windings counted, and beside it, in letters so tiny he had to tilt it to the coals, a name he had last seen written on a laboratory door in London.
HARTLEY.