"It will crack," said Kaneshige.
He said it on the first day, when they brought the bell down the mountain on a cart, and on the second, when Musashi broke it with a sledge into pieces the size of a man's hand, and on every day after that, in the voice of a man who would very much like to be wrong but had been a smith for forty years and was never wrong about metal.
"Bell bronze is for ringing," he said to John, slowly, so John could follow. By the winter John could follow most things said slowly. "Much tin. Hard and bright and brittle. You hit it cold, it shatters. You hit it hot, it shatters. It wants to be poured, not beaten." He looked at Musashi, who was sitting cross-legged in the corner of the forge with a block of cypress and a knife, carving. "He knows. I told him. He says he'll beat it anyway."
"Why?"
Kaneshige shrugged the shrug of a man whose customer is mad and pays in silver. "He says poured metal doesn't remember anything."
* * *
The wooden form took Musashi a month.
John watched it come out of the cypress in the evenings, between kata. It wasn't a face, quite. It was the top half of one: brow, the bridge of the nose, the cheekbones, the hollows under the eyes, and it ended in a straight line across the upper lip. Like the iron half-masks samurai wore under their helmets, but with no mouth and no snarl and no moustache of horsehair. Just a plain curve, and two eye slits so narrow John could hardly see light through them when Musashi held it up to the forge.
"Too narrow," John said, in Japanese.
"No," said Musashi. "Your eyes look at too much. You need to look at less."
He'd measured John's face with a string on the first night. He measured it again every week as John got thinner from the training, and pared the cypress down a hair at a time. When it was done he made John lie on his back on the forge floor and pressed it to his face, hard, and held it there, and John lay in the dark behind it breathing cedar dust and listening to the two narrow lines of light.
Then Kaneshige pressed the form into a bed of clay and sand, and Musashi lit the forge.
* * *
It took eleven days.
Musashi didn't pour it. He heated the shards of the bell one at a time, to a dull orange, no brighter, and laid them over the clay form, and beat them into it with a small round hammer. A shard at a time, overlapping at the edges, the way a man lays roof tiles, and each one beaten until it took the curve of the brow or the cheek and then folded into the one beside it, heated again, beaten again, so slowly that Kaneshige, working the bellows, sometimes fell asleep on his feet.
Twice a shard cracked. Both times Kaneshige said nothing, very loudly. Musashi took the cracked piece out with tongs and dropped it in the quench tub, and took up another from the pile, and went on.
John wasn't allowed to help. He wasn't allowed to Turn anything, either. He'd offered on the second day, thinking that if he could age a sword to rust he could surely soften a bit of bronze, and Musashi had looked at him as if he'd offered to piss in the tea.
"Not yours," he said. "Mine. You'll only wear it."
So John did kata in the yard and came in to watch at night, and on the third night Kiku came with him and stood in the door of the forge with her shawl round her head, watching the sparks.
She'd had the letter that morning.
"From the Fathers in Nagasaki," she said, without his asking. "The order has come from Edo. All of them are to leave Japan. The churches are to be pulled down. And the Japanese Christians are to give up the faith or be..." She didn't finish. "There's a ship to Macau in the third month. They've kept a place on it for me. Father Diogo wrote it himself. Maria, come home to us."
John looked at her in the firelight. "Will you go?"
"My mother is in Nagasaki," Kiku said. "My brothers. My whole life is here. In Macau I'd be a Japanese woman who talks Portuguese, and they have plenty of those." She pulled the shawl closer. "I could stay. Give it up. Put the cross in the river. Lots of people will. Lots of good people."
"Will you?"
"No," said Kiku. She looked at the sparks. "I'll keep it and not show it. And the day someone asks me to my face, I'll decide." She laughed, short and quiet. "You see, I'm like him. I'll beat it into shape a piece at a time and see if it cracks."
* * *
On the eleventh night Musashi took the mask out of the clay.
It was dark and rough and dull, covered in hammer marks like scales, a brownish-gold where it caught the forge light and almost black in the hollows. The joins between the shards showed as fine lines, like the cracks in old paint. You could see, if you looked, that it had once been something else: one cheek still carried a curve of raised letters from the bell's rim, characters John couldn't read.
Kaneshige turned it over in his hands for a long time.
"It didn't crack," he said, at last, and sounded almost angry about it.
Musashi took it from him and quenched it, and polished the inside with sand and then with oil, by hand, until the inside shone like the bowl of a spoon. He left the outside rough. He bored two small holes at the temples with a drill and threaded a cord of black silk through them.
Then he gave it to John, and went outside, and sat down in the snow in the yard, and fell asleep sitting up.
* * *
John put it on in the morning, in the yard, with Musashi and Kiku watching.
The bronze was cold, and then quite suddenly not cold. It fitted the way Florentine gloves fitted, as if made from a cast of him, which it had been. It sat on the bridge of his nose and his cheekbones with its weight spread evenly, and the inside, polished, was smooth as skin.
He looked out through the slits.
He saw two narrow strips of the world. The yard, the snow, the cherry tree black and bare, Musashi's knees. The sides of everything were gone. It was like looking out of a slit trench, he thought, and the thought should have been bad and wasn't.
"Now," said Musashi.
He pushed.
The Hold came down like a door closing on a quiet room. It came down without any of the usual grinding, the sense of shoving at something that didn't want to move. The snow stopped falling. A flake hung in front of the left slit, six-pointed, perfect, and the bell bronze lay on his face and he could feel it, very faintly, humming. Not a sound. A steadiness. As if the metal, which had struck the hours over a valley for three hundred years, was still doing it, quietly, against his skin, and his pulse had fallen in beside it the way a man's step falls in beside a drum.
One. He didn't count after that. He walked.
He walked across the yard, through the stopped snow, round the cherry tree and back, through the kata once, slowly, all nine movements, and his breath steamed and hung in front of his face, and he walked round behind Musashi and looked at the back of his neck for a while, at the hair tied up roughly with a bit of hemp, and then came back to where he'd started.
There was no blood on his lip.
He let it go.
The snow came down. Kiku said, "Oh," and put her hand over her mouth, because from her side he'd vanished from one place and stood in another, with snow on his shoulders that had fallen in no time at all.
"How long?" said Musashi.
John didn't know. He'd forgotten to count. He worked it out from the kata and the walk. "Thirty," he said. "More. And it didn't hurt."
Musashi nodded slowly. He didn't look pleased. He got up and came across the yard, and reached up, and untied the silk cord, and took the mask off John's face.
The world came in from the sides, all at once. Snow, sky, roofs, Kiku, smoke from the forge chimney, a crow on the wall, the hills, and on top of them, in a rush, the Branches. All the Branches of everything in the yard he hadn't seen while the slits were shut: the crow flying, the crow dead, the crow on a different wall; Kiku in a ship, Kiku in a courtyard with her head bowed, Kiku old; Musashi at a desk with a brush, Musashi alone in a cave writing...
He sat down in the snow.
"There," said Musashi, quietly, in Japanese, and John understood every word. "You see. The first time you take it off, it's like that. The second time, worse. The hundredth time, you won't want to take it off at all." He held the mask in his hand, rough side out, and looked at it. "This is a crutch. A good crutch. The best I'll ever make. But the man who walks on a crutch long enough forgets how to walk." He gave it back. "Keep it in your shirt. Put it on when you must. Not when you want to."
* * *
He kept it in his shirt for nine days, and on the tenth day, alone in the forge after Kaneshige had gone home, he put it on again because he wanted to.
He told himself it was a test. He wanted to see whether it helped the Branches, as well as the Hold. So he sat on the forge floor with the bronze on his face and the two narrow strips of light in front of him, and took up a handful of soot-blackened rice straw from the floor, and held it, and looked.
With the mask, the Branches came one at a time. Thin and clear, like voices down a telephone line. He could choose which.
He followed the straw. A farm. A village in the hills to the south-east, a day's walk, where the straw had been cut and bundled and sold. Paddies white with frost. A temple bell, a small one.
And then, some weeks out, a Branch he didn't choose. It came by itself, strong, the way the stair had come in Florence.
The village, at night. Fire in the thatch. Men in black with cloth masks over their faces going house to house, swords out. A woman running with a child.
And on the ridge above the village, standing very still with her arms folded, watching it burn, a tall woman with her hair cut short like a man's, in clothes like no one's.
She turned her head. She looked up the ridge, along the line of the Branch, straight at him, as if she knew exactly where he was looking from.
He tore the mask off. The forge came back, cold and dark. His heart was going like a machine gun and his hands were shaking.
He went to Musashi's house in the dark and woke him and told him. Kiku came, half dressed, to put the parts John didn't have words for into words. When he'd finished, Musashi sat on his mat in silence for a while with his chin on his fist.
"How many weeks?" he said.
"Three. Four. Not more."
"Which village?"
John told him what he'd seen: the bell, the paddies, the ridge with the three pines. Kiku said a name. Musashi nodded. He knew it.
"Why would she burn a village?" said Kiku. "It's nothing. Forty houses. It's not even on the road."
"Because I'll go," said John.
They both looked at him.
"She knew where I'd land. She knew Musashi would be on the island. She's got a thing that sees where I'll be." He'd worked it out walking over through the snow. "But I don't think it sees me directly. I think it sees the Wake. Where I make a mark. If she burns a village a day's walk from here, she knows exactly where I'll be, and when, and how I'll come, and how tired I'll be when I get there."
"So don't go," said Kiku.
John looked at Musashi. Musashi looked back at him with no expression, and waited, the way he'd waited on the beach, to see what he'd do.
"There are forty houses," John said.