arena.
“Were you armed?”
“No. I should have been.”
“Maybe. But you weren’t. And even if you’d had a pistol and knew how to use it, what if you come up against five or eight armed guys? You can’t cover every base. There’s no dishonor in being out-gunned. This was the attacker’s game, not yours.”
Jay blinked. The man was right. Intellectually, he knew there wasn’t anything he could have done to stop it.
Emotionally, it was another matter. But still…
“Thanks, Colonel. I appreciate the ear and the advice.”
“No problem. Next time my computer breaks down, I’ll call you.”
Jay managed a smile.
30
Thorn stripped away the VR gear and blew out a big sigh. This Natadze guy was getting to be a major pain. Thorn had expected to have found something else on him by now, but the man was just not there. He loved guitars and he shot people, that was pretty much it.
Clearly, Net Force would have to come up with some other approach. But what?
He looked at the clock. He’d been under for two hours, and he felt stiff and stale. Time to go to the gym for a little R&R.
As he got there, he saw Colonel Kent arriving at the same moment. In his left hand, he held his sheathed
“Commander.”
“Colonel. Going to work out?”
“I thought I might wave this old blade around a little, yes.”
“Would you mind if I watched?”
“No, sir.” A pause. “Tom.”
Thorn grinned and followed Kent into the gym, which was empty save for them.
“If you had a sword, I could show you some of the basics,” Kent said.
Thorn grinned again. “As it happens, I do have a Japanese sword in my locker.”
Kent nodded, as if he wasn’t particularly surprised.
Thorn went to fetch the weapon, a
When he got back, Kent had stripped to his T-shirt and trousers, his feet also bare. He looked to be in good shape for a man his age. Or for a man Thorn’s age. He knelt on the mat in that butt-on-heels position called
“Can you get into this pose?”
Thorn nodded.
Kent pointed to his right. “Better sit over on that side. About six feet away.”
Thorn kneeled, placing his own sword to his left on the mat.
“My grandfather knew all the Japanese terminology,” Kent said, “but what it boils down to is essentially a very few actions you perform with the sword — everything else is built on those.”
He bowed, touching his head to the mat, his palms down forming a triangle with his thumbs and forefingers on the surface. He came back upright, picked the sword up with his left hand, and turned it so the edge-curve faced outward. He pressed against the guard with his thumb.
“You loosen the blade in the sheath, like so.”
Thorn leaned forward a little to see better.
“The first move is the draw—”
Kent pulled the sword’s blade free in a single, fluid motion, whipped it outward to his left in a flat arc toward his right. At the same time, he came up on his right foot, his left knee still on the ground. As the sword passed in front of him, he circled the blade, twisting it from a horizontal slash from left to right into an overhead curve that came down straight in front of his body. During this, he set the sheath down, and brought his left hand to the sword’s handle, well behind his right hand. The final part of the motion was much like a man with an axe splitting a log:
“The cut.”
He opened his right hand, maintaining his grip with the left, and made his right hand into a fist. He hammered once lightly on the back ridge of the blade just ahead of the guard with the little-finger side of his right fist.
“The shaking of blood.”
He opened his right fist, caught the handle in a reverse grip, let go with his left hand, swung the blade so that the point angled to his left, arced downward and then up, almost 270 degrees, to point at the back wall. Meanwhile, he used his left hand to catch the mouth of the scabbard, thumb on one side, forefinger on the other, as if about to pinch. He moved the sword backward, touched the sheath’s mouth with the back edge of the blade, six inches above the guard. He drew the blade forward, right arm passing across his belly, sliding the spine along the sheath’s opening. His thumb and forefinger looked as if they were wiping the steel. When the point reached the mouth, he moved his right hand forward, angled and inserted the tip into the sheath, then slid the blade slowly home. He used his forefinger to snug the weapon into place.
He did not look at the sword when he did any of this.
“And the re-sheath,” he said.
Thorn grinned. Right out of
He put the sword back down, bowed again, then looked at Thorn.
“That’s basically it. Four moves — pull it, cut, knock the blood off, and put it away. You can do it standing, squatting, kneeling, or even lying on your side. There are a bunch of ways to cut, various angles and targets, other ways to sling the blood and re-sheath, and you can use the point to stick somebody, but that’s pretty much the core of
“Fascinating,” Thorn said.
“The idea is to cultivate a sense of awareness of everything,
“Not much like western fencing,” Thorn said.
“The Japanese have a different mind-set,” Kent said. “Kill or be killed — or both, it didn’t much matter to the warriors. ‘The way of the samurai is found in death.’ If you were going to die, you wanted to be sure to take your enemy with you if you could, but dying yourself was of little consequence. Your life belonged to your lord, and he could do whatever he wanted with it. Everybody knew that. It makes for a different kind of match.”
“I can see that.”
“Want to try it?”
“Very much.”
“Okay. Here’s how you bow…”
