THE RONIN

He was carrying the last of two brimming buckets up the mountain path. The blow came from behind and landed squarely across his right ear. The tremendous pain was like looking into the sun. He blinked and found himself on the ground. The buckets were rolling happily back down the mountain and the Old Man was looking down at him with great satisfaction as if he'd wanted to do this cruel think for a long, long time. He was leaning on a length of new bamboo, apparently cut just for this occasion.

..........

Frowning, the boy rose and started back down for the buckets. He'd Hardly gone three steps before the bamboo struck again. It roared across his shoulders with shocking pain. The boy let out a howl and scrambled as fast as he could on hands and knees into the bushes. He peered back out. The Old Man was looking at him intently. The boy gasped as he realized that the old bastard had finally gone completely mad. He hadn't any idea what to do so he just crouched there and looked back intently.

He remained hiding long after the madman had gone into the hut and slid the door shut. While trying to decide a course of action, the boy crept carefully down the hill, automatically found and filled the buckets, and brought them back up. He was just emptying the first into the bath barrel when something told him to duck. As a consequence the third blow glanced off his shoulder. He fled around a corner of the hut. Peering back, he found the clearing empty. The old coot was fast. There was the faintest rustle behind him. Without waiting to look, the boy leaped forward, but not soon enough to escape an exquisite rap on the coccyx.(ccok­icks) Clutching his little tail, he fled moaning into the forest.

There were three more attacks before supper. By then, the boy was so jumpy that he decided against eating. Ordered to come in, however, he obeyed. The old hands held out his full bowl abruptly and he jumped away, blushed and returned. The old voice said, "Fool, even mad old teachers don't waste good food."

They ate in their usual silence, then the Old Man said to him through the twilight, "An animal will jump at every sound, a leaf in the wind, a falling cone. A disciplined man will move only when it is necessary." There was a thoughtful pause then the addendum: "The moment before it is necessary."

.....

It wasn't for many, many nerve­wracked days that the boy remembered his decision about the journey in the full moon. He smiled bitterly, remembering that he had been crushed by monotony back then. Sweet monotony' Now, flinching at every leaf in the wind and every fallen cone, he yearned for just a few minutes of comfortable' restful monotony.

Thereafter, he never turned his back on the Old Man again. He might be carrying a load o£ wood, reading a sutra or helpless in the bathing barrel, but part of his mind was always alert for that vicious stick of bamboo. When it came, he let fly what he carried, dived for cover and cleaned up the mess later when the Fiend was gone.

Yet in time he round it possible to duck instead of dive, to veer and not drop the wood, the water or the book. He was almost surprised to find it was possible to move with caution and still get all of his chores done in good time. The unwarranted persecution was only as much of an obstacle as his lack of skill allowed it to be.

......

It became a grave game in which he gradually forgot to be angry with his teacher. When the bamboo fell with unexpected ingenuity and landed full and hard, his first thought was in admiration: I am proud of my adversary. Then no longer did he merely pass through a door thinking of something else. It became an act of dangerous importance. Nor did he round a corner unthinkingly, approach the top of a hill blithely, nor pass closely by a tree. Reverie was replaced by exquisite attention to what he was doing. Each act called for total concentration if he was to avoid pain, a fall of pride and the tattoo or a bruise. So, to avoid hurt, he learned to perceive Everything that is Now.

Later, there were times when he came to sense that which he could not perceive. He stood long minutes outside the dark door somehow certain that there was a raised and waiting stick within. He stood motionless for two then three, five then ten minutes, and at last realizing he was a fool to hesitate all night outside an empty room, shrugged, entered and fell beneath an outraged blow that repeated itself with mounting fury as the old voice grated, "You knew, you knew, and yet you used this door. Damn you, at least try to keep me interested in holding school!"

......

His second year ended with a triumph that was too incredible to believe. Walking silently, he came upon his teacher waiting for him faced the other way! There was hardly an instant of joy before he fell into a terrible concern for the Old Man's skill! The poor man stood helpless! And further, how desperately humiliating to have so poor a student catch one in an awkwardness!

Silent as a shadow, he went back the way he came. The Old Man turned in time to see him go. His old eyes went wide then melted into a smile.

The next day he sat in the center of the clearing and summoned the boy from his work. The student knelt, bowed and sat straight before him. Their eyes met and held, and they exchanged many kinds of silent information. Then the Old Man held out to him a bamboo stick of his own, a new one cut for this occasion.

With the greatest effort, the boy reached out slowly and took the stick, slowly bowed and slowly rose to walk down the forest path in dignity.

The Old Man had only to glance at that young back to know the boy was crying quiet, sober tears.

Each attainment brings its own despair. No ruler could have taken more pride in his scepter than the boy in his bamboo stick­­ and the Old Man flicked it from his hands with derisive ease. The boy picked it up, took his stance and somehow there it went again. He picked it up with absolute determination, gritted his teeth and gripped it until his knuckles were white. It flew from his hands as if escaping. He picked up the bamboo stick a thousand times until his heart knew he could never be a swordsman. The skill was beyond him. The only question was how to leave most unobtrusively.

But life on the mountain was intensely interesting. With no set practice periods, the boy carried the stick under his belt as a permanent part of his clothing and merely dropped what he was doing when attacked. Each duel lasted until both of them were sure that he'd been killed yet once again. The question was not whether but when.

......

He happened to notice that the thumb of the Old Man's upper hand curled slightly down just before each lunge. The boy began to watch it intently and to avoid the deadly whir once or twice in ten. He thought, "At last, I'm beginning to learn something," and was a breath away from pride, when the Old Man followed his gaze, frowned and curled his thumb without a lunge. The boy dodged instantly. The Old Man grunted in disgust and walked away without bothering to kill him.

That remained a puzzle to him for many days and he searched the Old Man closely for other little quirks. Then his own voice said to him, "How often would a swordsman fight the same man and learn his little ways? With cold steel, each man once." And with infinite slowness, he learned the precise place to study in an adversary. The clue for action lay in the eyes but not in any move they made. One immersed oneself in the eyes in order to become the adversary. All else followed.

It was in the fifth month of the bamboo stick that he finally made a thrust of his own. Wholly unpremeditated, it was a wide miss and followed by a knuckle cracking blow, but it had happened at last. The Old Man stood looking at him a long moment, nodded and walked off. It was a proud day in the hut.

Not quite a year later, the boy parried a blow and brought his stick down on the Old Man's shoulder with accuracy and force. He instantly dropped the weapon and knelt to ask forgiveness when he found himself hugged firmly in two strong old arms. And the old voice whispered in the carefully awkward sentimentality of a warrior, "I shall not forget this blow."

A moment later the boy was scrambling madly for his stick under a storm of blows that echoed about the clearing.

Another year passed and he became a most mature thirteen.

There was jubilation in the palace when a messenger returned with the news that the "young man" was ready to get the reel of a real sword. The Daimyo and his counselors debated for days whether the blade should be the Sukesada in the Great Hall or the Yoshimitsu being cared for by a cousin.

......

The youth wasn't sure he liked the sword, though to the eye it was a Jewel. It seemed so light after his familiar bamboo stick. The Old Man took it into the clearing and slashed the air for most of an hour; he handed it back in silence. The young man also tried it on the air, tried it every day alone­­ for one does not practice steel upon another man. His kiai echoed through the forest in the morning mist, at midday and twilight when the rice­steam writhed to him like the ghost of a serpent upon the air.

He never knew when the testing ended. He was simply aware one day that the sword was really his, part of him and wholly right. And that it had been for a long, long time, perhaps even before the procession up the path, and that it would always be no matter who might own it next. It never again left his side. Nor did he ever tell a soul the name he had given it, a name so secret that his lips had never formed it.

.......

Now their bouts with wooden swords took on a fury that stilled the forest about them, and the young man carefully crippled his skill so as not to hurt the Old Man. At length, the Old Man said, "At this point, you have as much to learn from meditation as you have from me. Go especially to the Shinto shrine on the dark side of the Mountain." He went that same day and found the room empty of everything but a mirror in the gloom.

He found it odd, then acceptable, then finely pertinent.

Now, he chopped wood and swept the floor and fetched water, all with the supreme care of reverence. The months passed a moment at a time and each instant was a golden awareness of itself. There was neither past nor future. Purpose and determination faded into mere sounds, and as he climbed out of the bathing barrel, the Old Man brought his stick lightly up between the wet young legs and said, "What happened to the peas? You've turned them into acorns. Stop before they're pine cones. Pride is a burden."

The young man blushed and smiled and went about his work, his study, his practice and his growth. He became fifteen­­ and a man.

He was never aware or the season, the day nor hour in which he became the greatest swordsman in all the Island Realm. Shielded from this deadly knowledge by his desperate efforts to miss his treasured adversary, the thought never entered his mind that he was anything but a student.

Then one day, gathering firewood, he came to a cliff looking down upon the Hanging Lake. There he saw a man and a woman in a little covered boat that made an arrow of its wake. He was stunned beyond comprehension. He woke from a long, sweet sleep into cacophony, assuming that pain is more real than a pleasure.

An hour later he was gone, leaving this note behind' "My parents made me a child. My teacher made me a man." There was a long, thoughtful space then these words: "Nor does the severed limb cease to be part of the Tree."

The Old Man read it, carefully folded the paper and placed it upon the fire. Then he laid his bamboo practice stick upon the flames, watched it burn and rose to finish what he'd been doing the day the child arrived.

(The End)

THE RONIN



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