Etsuko bowed low to the seated doll, folding her hands together on her stomach. And when she straightened up there was a wooden hashi in her hand. The ‘petitioner’ made a lightning-swift movement and the stick sank straight into the daijin’s painted eye.
‘Ah, well done,’ Rakuda said approvingly. ‘She carved the hashi out of hard wood, sharpened the end and smeared it with poison. She has passed the test.’
‘But they wouldn’t have allowed her to get away! The bodyguards would have killed her on the spot!’
‘What difference does that make? The commission has been carried out.’
Then Erast Petrovich saw training in unarmed combat, and this, perhaps, made the strongest impression of all on him. He had never imagined that the human body was capable of such things.
By this time Masa had finished carrying things about and he joined his master. He observed the acrobatic tricks of the Stealthy Ones with a sour face and seemed thoroughly envious.
The training was supervised by Tamba himself. There were three students. One of them, the youngest, was not very interesting to watch: he kept getting up and falling, getting up and falling – backwards, face down, sideways, somersaulting over his head. The second one – the pock-faced Gohei, who was one of the gaijin’s ‘bodyguards’ – hacked at the jonin with a sword. He attacked with extremely subtle and cunning thrusts, swung from above and below, and at the legs, but the blade always sliced through the empty air. And Tamba didn’t make a simple superfluous movement, he just leaned slightly to the side, squatted down or jumped up. This entertainment was frightening to watch. The third student, a fidgety fellow of about thirty (Rakuda said his name was Okami), fought with his eyes blindfolded. Tamba held a bamboo board in front of him, changing its position all the time, and Okami struck it with unerringly accurate blows from his hands and feet.
‘He has intuition,’ Rakuda said respectfully. ‘Like a bat.’
In the end Masa could no longer bear the expressions of admiration that Fandorin uttered from time to time. With a determined sniff, he walked over to the jonin, bowed abruptly and made a request of some kind.
‘He wishes to fight with one of the pupils,’ Erast Petrovich’s guide translated.
Tamba cast a sceptical eye over the former Yakuza’s sturdy figure and shouted:
‘Neko-chan!’
A wizened little old woman emerged from the hut near by, wiping flour off her hands with her apron. The jonin pointed at Masa and gave a brief order. The old woman smiled broadly, opening a mouth that had only one yellow tooth, and took off her apron.
It was clear from Masa’s face just how terribly insulted he felt. However, Fandorin’s faithful vassal demonstrated his self-control by walking up politely to the matron and asking her about something. Instead of answering, she slapped him on the forehead with her hand – it looked like a joke, but Masa squealed in pain. His flour-dusted forehead turned white and his face turned red. Fandorin’s servant tried to grab the insolent hag by the scruff of her neck, but she took hold of his wrist, twisted it slightly – and the master of jujitsu and connoisseur of the Okinawa style of combat went tumbling head over heels to the ground. The amazing old woman didn’t give him time to get up. She skipped towards the defeated man, pressed him down against the ground with her knee and squeezed his throat with her bony hand – he gave a strangulated wheeze and slapped his palm on the ground in a sign of surrender.
Neko-chan immediately opened her fingers. She bowed to the jonin, picked up her apron and went back to her duties in the kitchen.
And that was the moment, as Fandorin looked at the dejected Masa, who didn’t dare raise his own eyes to look at his master, that the titular counsellor decided he had to learn the secrets of ninjutsu.
When Tamba heard the request, he was not surprised, but he said:
‘It is hard to gain insight into the secrets of ninjutsu, a man must devote his entire life to it, from the day he is born. But you are too old, you will not achieve complete mastery. To master a few skills is all that you can hope for.’
‘Let it be a f-few skills. I accept that.’
The jonin cast a quizzical glance at the stubborn jut of the titular counsellor’s jaw and shrugged.
‘All right, let’s try.’
Erast Petrovich beamed joyfully, immediately stubbed out his cigar and jumped to his feet.
‘Shall I take my jacket off?’
Tamba breathed out a thin stream of smoke.
‘No. First you will sit, listen and try to understand.’
‘All right.’
Fandorin obediently sat down, took a notebook out of his pocket and prepared to take notes.
‘Ninjutsu consists of three main arts: monjutsu, the art of secrecy, taijutsu, the art of controlling the body, and bujutsu, the art of controlling a weapon…’
The pencil started scraping nimbly across the paper, but Tamba laughed, making it clear that he was imitating the manner of a typical lecturer only in fun.
‘But we shall not get to all that for a long, long time. For now, you must make yourself like a newborn child who is discovering the world and studying the abilities of his own body. You must learn to breathe, drink, eat, control the functioning of your inner organs, move your arms and legs, crawl, stand, walk, fall. We teach our children from the cradle. We stretch their joints and muscles. We rock the cradle roughly and rapidly, so that the little child quickly learns to shift its centre of gravity. We encourage what ordinary children are punished for: imitating the calls of animals and birds, throwing stones, climbing trees. You will never be like someone raised in a shinobi family. But do not let that frighten you. Flexible limbs and stamina are not the most important things.’
‘Then what is most important, sensei?’ asked Erast Petrovich, using the most respectful Japanese form of address.
‘You must know how to formulate a question correctly. That is half of the task. And the second half is being able to hear the answer.’
‘I d-don’t understand…’
‘A man consists of questions, and life and the world around him consist of answers to these questions. Determine the sequence of the questions that concern you, starting with the most important. Then attune yourself to receive the answers. They are everywhere, in every event, in every object.’
‘Really in every one?’
‘Yes. For every object is a particle of the Divine Body of the Buddha. Take this stone here…’ Tamba picked up a piece of basalt from the ground and showed it to his pupil. ‘Take it. Look at it very carefully, forgetting about everything except your question. See what an interesting surface the stone has; all these hollows and bumps, the pieces of dirt adhering to it, the flecks of other substances in it. Imagine that your entire life depends on the structure and appearance of this stone. Study this object for a very long time, until you feel that you know everything about it. And then ask it your question.’
‘Which one, for instance?’ asked Erast Petrovich, examining the piece of basalt curiously.
‘Any. If you should do something or not. If you are living your life correctly. If you should be or not be.’
‘To be or not to be?’ the titular counsellor repeated, not entirely sure whether the jonin had quoted Shakespeare or whether it was merely a coincidence. ‘But how can a stone answer?’