In a fair approximation of Obi Wan Kenobi, Mike said, “A lightsaber is the weapon of a Jedi—not as clumsy or random as a blaster.” He slashed it back and forth and made electrical humming noises on each pass.
Crow grinned at that. “I’ll give you some books on the samurai, Mike…and you can look up some stuff on the Net. They were among the greatest warriors in history, and to them the sword was emblematic of their soul. In fact they believed that their sword was a physical manifestation of their soul.”
Mike looked at his wooden sword and then at Crow’s beautiful weapon and then cocked an eyebrow. “So…my soul is a beat-up piece of wood and yours is a work of art?”
“Well, of course, that’s obvious,” Crow said straight-faced, then smiled and shook his head. “No, the difference between the two weapons is like the difference between what you are and what you can become.” When he saw that Mike wasn’t following him, he tried it another way. “You look at the two swords and see the difference between us, or at least what you perceive is the difference between us, but in fact the difference is that your sword is blunt. Just like you right now. Now, consider Vic for a moment…he’s dangerous, but he isn’t sharp. He isn’t refined. He’s the perfect definition of blunt force.” He saw Mike glance suddenly down at the wooden sword as if he wanted to spit on it and throw it away. “Whereas you may be starting blunt and unrefined you are not going to stay that way. Are you?”
Mike hefted the wooden sword and considered its weight, and then glanced at Crow’s sword. He shook his head.
“So, I’m going to show you some things to do with the sword because the sword teaches us so much.”
“Like what?”
“Glad you asked,” said Crow, and winked. “Kenjutsu, the Japanese art of swordplay, may not be practical on the streets of the twenty-first century, that I’ll grant you, but the process of learning the sword is. Very much so, because it teaches focus, balance, precision, timing, control. You see, there’s a paradox in swordplay that is at the heart of its appeal. You know what a paradox is?”
“Dude, how many science fiction novels have I read? Of course I know what a paradox is.”
“I stand corrected. Well, the paradox at the heart of kenjutsu is that there is no way to achieve perfection in swordsmanship. No matter how good you are, there is always a level of skill beyond where you are.”
“So…what’s that mean? That it doesn’t matter how good you are?”
“Not exactly. What it means is that it only matters that you are striving to be better than you are.” Crow let Mike chew on that for a moment.
Mike rolled his eyes. “Is this one of those ‘the journey is the destination’ things?”
“Yep, and if you’re about to dismiss that concept just because you’ve heard it before—don’t. In this case it’s especially important because in learning the sword we aren’t just learn to be good at it…we’re discovering that each time we train we’re better at it, and that the more we concentrate on it and the harder we train, the more subtle and deft we become. You see, when the samurai trained all those thousands of hours in swordplay, only part of it was to sharpen their skills in case they had to fight. What they were really doing was sharpening their souls.” He paused. “They were refining who they were. Cutting away at the elements of their personalities that did not advance them forward in spirit.”
“You’re starting to go all Yoda on me here.”
“Yeah, I guess.” Crow sucked his teeth for a minute, assessing his own words. “Tell you what…let’s just do some training with the sword and then we’ll see if you’re getting anything out of it. Is that simple enough?”
Mike shrugged. “I guess.”
Crow walked over and flipped open the top of the plastic cooler that was set on the back step of his building, fished around in it, and then brought out an apple. “I’m going to throw this at your head,” he said casually. “Try to knock it out of the way with your sword.”
“You kidding me here?” Mike said.
“Nope,” said Crow and tossed the apple. He threw it under-handed and without much speed or force, but it bumped Mike in the forehead despite the wild swings of the wooden bokken.
“Ow!”
“Sorry. Now, pick it up and throw it back.”
Looking angry, Mike picked up the apple and threw it. Harder than he intended and much faster, right at Crow’s face. There was a rasping sound, a glitter of sunlight on steel, and the two halves of the apple hit the back wall of the building on either side of where Crow stood. He held the sword in one hand, the scabbard in the other, and he was smiling. With a snap of his wrist he pointed the sword down at the floor and droplets of moisture from the apple flew from the oiled blade and patterned the flagstones; then with a flash that was too fast for Mike to follow, Crow swung the sword around and returned it to its scabbard.
“Holy shit!” Mike cried.
“Watch your language, you juvenile delinquent,” Crow said, feeling pleased with himself—especially since he sometimes bungled that particular trick and screwing it up right now would have really sucked. That it had worked so well just then he counted as a nice gesture on the part of the universe—not for himself, but for Mike, whose eyes were sparkling with excitement. “So…you wanna learn how to be a samurai?” Crow asked.
Mike looked at the two pieces of apple, then at Crow’s sword, and then at his own.
“Yeah,” he said softly and when he looked up, Crow could see that something had ignited in the boy’s eyes.
But Crow read it wrong. Mike was not standing there dazzled by what Crow had just done—he was impressed, sure—but seeing the sweet elegance of that cut had done something else to Mike and he was teetering on the edge of understanding it. He was also dangerously close to lapsing into another fugue state, but that part of his mind was closed to introspection. No, the realization that was slowly catching fire in his mind was how close all of this—Crow, the sword, the skill of the cut—was to the stuff of his recent dreams. Even the sword Crow held looked the same. Mike was almost positive it was the same, though he knew it couldn’t be. As Crow’s sword flashed through the air Mike felt as if somehow lightning had danced from the edge of that blade right into his chest. He felt supercharged and while he stood there listening to Crow speak and not taking in a single word, Mike’s grip on the sword changed. It was a subtle thing, but as he held the sword in his hand his fingers flexed to let the handle rest more comfortably against his palm, his elbow bent a bit more to allow his forearm to counterbalance the weight of the long wooden blade, and he raised the tip of the sword so that it would not touch the ground.
He was aware of none of this. The changes were small, the corrections subtle, but thereafter he never picked up the bokken and held it incorrectly again. Weeks later, when he held a real sword in his hands, all of this would matter.
Worlds turn on such moments.
(4)
Newton set his coffee cup down, rubbed his tired eyes, and turned back to his monitor screen. He had four Explorer browser screens open and he was nearly fried from surfing the Net all day, getting as much backstory as he could on the information Crow and Val had given him. He did background searches on every name Crow had given him—Vic Wingate, Polk, Bernhardt, half a dozen others—working to get inside of the story, to try and see it from the point of view of a nine-year-old Malcolm Crow. He also searched for any scrap of information he could find on Ubel Griswold. If he was going to go with Crow into the forest to find Griswold’s old farm—thirty years overgrown—he wanted to know the man, perhaps to demystify him as a protection against what Crow believed of him.