Chapter 2: Sweet Potatoes and Bellows
On the first morning he brought sweet potatoes.
Not one sweet potato. Not a polite basket. He arrived at your door before the cock crowed carrying a sack so large he had clearly been told not to carry it, and set it down on your step with the satisfied grunt of a man who had just disobeyed his physician in a way he felt was justified.
"Your apprentice says you like them roasted!" he said. "I have found that I also like them roasted! We have so much in common already!"
You looked at the sack. You looked at your apprentice, who had suddenly become very interested in sweeping a corner that did not need it.
"I said I like them," you said. "Once. When I was hungry."
"Then you'll never be hungry again!"
You roasted three in the coals of the forge because it would have been a waste of good charcoal not to. He ate eleven. Every single one, he bit into with his whole face and said "Umai!" loudly enough that the swordsmith next door, an old man who had not spoken to you since you corrected his quench temperature in front of witnesses, came over to see if someone was being murdered. Rengoku offered him a sweet potato. The old man took it, ate it, said it was underdone, and left in a better mood than you had seen him in for a year.
"He likes you," Rengoku said.
"He hates me."
"He likes you," Rengoku repeated, with total confidence, and peeled his twelfth.
On the second day he tried to work the bellows.
You had explained, clearly and in short words, that he was not to lift anything, pull anything, or swing anything. He agreed with everything. Then you turned around to fetch your clay and turned back to find him kneeling at the great box bellows, pumping it with one arm in long, perfect strokes that had the coals going white.
"Stop," you said.
"I'm using Flame Breathing," he said, not stopping. "Total Concentration. It's very good for the lungs! Kocho says I must exercise them."
"She said breathing exercises. Not this."
"This is breathing! I am breathing at the fire!"
The forge was roaring. Sweat stood out on his forehead. His one eye was bright and focused, and he looked happier than you had seen anyone look doing a job that apprentices cried about. You watched the color of the coals and did a quick calculation.
"Slower," you said.
He slowed.
"Slower. The fire isn't a demon. You don't have to kill it."
He laughed, breath catching on his ribs, and found the rhythm. You worked on a set of habaki for a different slayer while he kept the fire, and neither of you said anything for nearly an hour. It was the quietest you had ever heard him. The silence was not empty. It was full of the bellows' long wooden sigh and the ring of your hammer and the occasional pop of a coal, and somewhere in the middle of it you realized you had stopped waiting for him to talk.
When you finally called a halt, he sat back on his heels, damp and pleased, and said, "I like watching you work."
"You can't see anything. I'm wearing a mask."
"I can see your hands," he said. "And your shoulders. When you get it right, they go down."
You did not know what to do with that, so you hit the habaki once more than it needed.
On the third day he read you poetry. It was very bad poetry. It was his own.
"The flame does not ask permission of the dark," he declaimed from a rock beside the hot spring path, where he had been strictly instructed to sit and rest by a passing village nurse. Half the village had come to listen. "It simply burns! And so I burn! For you! A smith!"
"That last line doesn't scan," you said from the steps of the bathhouse, where you had gone to wash the soot off and been ambushed.
"It doesn't need to scan! It needs to be true!"
"It needs to scan or it's not a poem. It's a speech with line breaks."
"Then I will give you a speech with line breaks every day until you like one!"
The village chief, perched on a cushion that someone had carried out for him so he wouldn't miss anything, raised his teacup. "I like them," Tecchin said. "Read the one about the hammer again."
Rengoku read the one about the hammer again. It rhymed "anvil" with "an evil," and the village applauded, and you went home and put your head down on your workbench and laughed so hard you had to take off your mask to breathe.
Your apprentice watched you with deep suspicion. "You like him."
"I like his sword."
"You've finished his sword. You finished it yesterday. It's been sitting in the cabinet since lunch, and you keep telling him you need to fix the polish."
You put your mask back on. "The polish isn't right."
"The polish is perfect."
"The polish," you said, "isn't right."
On the fourth night you found him at the shelf.
You had gone out to fetch charcoal and come back to the lamp still burning and him standing at the back of your forge, in the corner you didn't let anyone into, holding a single tsuba in his hand. It was a plain iron guard pierced with a pattern of pine needles. You knew exactly whose it was. You had made the sword it sat on for a slayer from Akita who laughed at everything and wrote his letters in a hand so bad you had to guess at half the words. The Kakushi had brought his blade home in the rain. There had not been a body.
Rengoku turned when he heard you. He did not put the tsuba down or pretend he hadn't been looking. That was the thing about him. He never pretended.
"These are from swords that didn't come back," he said. It wasn't a question.
"The swords came back," you said. "The people didn't."
He looked at the shelf. Seven tsuba. A box of habaki. Small, ordinary things. He touched each one with a fingertip, as if counting.
"You keep them," he said.
"Somebody should."
"Do you know all their names?"
"Yes."
He was quiet for a long time. The lamp hissed. Outside, the river did what rivers do.
"I understand now," he said at last. "Why you won't take off the mask for me."
You had expected anything else. A speech. A poem. A cheerful assurance that he, unlike the slayer from Akita, would never die. Every swordsman you had ever met had said a version of that. They said it the way people say good morning.
He did not say it.
"I am a Hashira," Rengoku said, turning the pine-needle tsuba over in his palm. "One day, my sword will come back to you without me. I won't insult you by pretending otherwise. I almost didn't come back this time." He touched the bandage over his eye, lightly, like checking something was still there. "I lay on the ground by that train and I could feel my heart trying to stop, and I thought about my mother, and my brother, and my students. And I thought, very clearly, that I would like to have met the person who made my sword. That I had carried your work for two years and never once asked your name. That seemed like the greatest waste of all."
You stood in the doorway with charcoal dust to your elbows. You could not, for the life of you, think of anything to say.
"So I came," he said. "I wanted to know you before it was too late. That's all. That's all courting is, I think. Deciding someone is worth knowing before it's too late." He set the tsuba back on the shelf, exactly where it had been, edge aligned with the mark in the dust. "I'm sorry I touched them. I won't again."
He walked past you to the door. At the threshold he stopped.
"Your polish is perfect," he said gently, without turning around. "I looked. Goodnight."
You stood in your forge for a long time after he had gone. Then you went to the cabinet and took out his sword, and looked at it, and put it back. Then you went to the shelf and took down a lump of Mount Yoko steel you had been saving for no reason you could name, and set it on the anvil, and stoked up the fire.
You worked until dawn. You did not think about why.
Rengoku did not come by on the fifth morning. There were no sweet potatoes on the step. No voice on the stairs.
You told yourself you were relieved. You told yourself so all through breakfast and halfway through lunch, until your apprentice came running up the path with her sandals in her hand and her face white.
"The crow," she gasped. "A Kasugai crow came for him. There's a demon in the next valley, at the inn by the pass. Two Kakushi are already dead and the nearest slayer is a day away."
You set down your hammer very carefully.
"He's on leave," you said. "He can't fight. He can't even lift a sack of potatoes without tearing his stitches. He doesn't have a sword."
Your apprentice swallowed.
"He took one from the training rack," she said. "He's already gone."