He was drunk and alone and this was often the case. A gourd gently lolling at his feet, helped on its way by his bare foot. He was smiling, beaming up at the sun beaming down, though half of his body was in the shade of the dojo, the screens opened wide. Behind, there was no sound – no clack of wooden swords, no grunts of triumph – no shuffling feet or cries of pain. There were no students, and there had been no students for a long time.

Miyo was fine with this.

He was fine with this because he was drunk, and he was drunk often as to be fine with this. The years had been long and hard, but the decline of his school swift and merciless – it came, principally, by the utterance of a single syllable, a simple 'No'. This was the correct response, none other would do.

He still felt this way.

However, he did permit himself a fantasy now and then, of the opposite outcome, the Yes. The definite.

His head lolled back, he thought he would gently decline, cradle the back of his largely hairless skull like a babe and let out a wistful sigh. He fell instead, and screwed his wrinkled eyes tight. It didn't hurt. Much.

There the scene played out behind his eyelids, memory poignant. Life changing.

A young man all stern muscle and scowl, his hair tied back in the traditional warriors knot, swords bristling at his side like a razor back scuttle. He had come in ostentatiously, as was custom, during mid practice, and at once the clack of wooden swords were silenced, and all eyes turned on the new comer. Some were clearly hostile gazes, students willing to expel the interloper at all bodily cost to themselves, others, generally the younger and recently initiated, a bit more unsure. Least unsure of all were those that recognized the man at once.

Koji Katori. Divine pupil of that most prodigious school, and considered in and of himself a master at sixteen summers only. The young man carried himself with all accorded respect, sure he could dispatch any, and not far wrong. He had come seeking a duel with the Master of this house, Miyo himself; back then much younger – when his hair was black and full, when the wrinkles on his face were only hints instead of crags, when his body was firm instead of bloated and sagging.

Miyo smiled to himself; he was a fine specimen, once. The smile slipped as the recollection deepened, quickened, leaped in weeks and years.

He had declined Koji's duel. Miyo was principled, committed to that which he was taught, committed to the disdain for the shedding of blood where there was no need – and matters of petty honor no need at all. So, no, he said, and then Koji, jaw clenched, hand white on the grip of his sword, ready seeming at once to draw. But he relented, relaxed, bowed as protocol demanded, walked backwards three steps facing Miyo, waiting until he had left the dojo before turning his back. It was full of proper decorum, no one could be dissatisfied, no honor lost. Yet the rumors spread. Miyo was a coward. A coward had no place teaching the sword.

The younger ones left first, the elders completed their training – but they would not go forth and evangelize. They wouldn't do the opposite either, but they certainly did not want anyone knowing where they had received their knowledge, and indeed, those most striking features of the Yoshitaka style, the flourishes, the graceful idiosyncrasies, were absent from those graduates repertoire, wheresoever they had cause to demonstrate what a man can do with a blade.

No one else would come to learn. The school would deteriorate, as would Miyo's faith, and his own discipline waned, so that at the end of the process of decay, he could no longer cleave to even that most thin thread of confidence that he once had in himself.

That was when the drinking started.

There was no coin for repairs, evidenced now by the holes in the walls, placed there by a careless drunken swing by Miyo himself, or the wind during a storm. Along the wall where practice weapons were still arrayed on dusty stands, water leaked during any rain at all and made an ugly stain on the mats below. There was nothing to be done for it, and no reason to change that. His home was rotting; his gut was rotting. This was fine, discord mistaken for harmony.

Miyo sighed, and he rocked himself back up to sitting on the worn wooden planks – long since grown dull, and no wax having been applied in some twelve years. Where would the coin come for such a luxury as a well kept home?

The family heirlooms were growing thin, perhaps half a dozen swords, well wrought, and a suit of moth-balled armor. There would be nothing left to sell soon, perhaps there was nothing left to sell even now. Those articles that Miyo still clung too held value both sentimental and monetary, there was a reason that everything else had went before – all the cook-ware, the sculptures, scrolls – he dreaded the day when he would discover whether or not he would squander all of his family's legacy for a few brass coins. As his purse grew lean, he began to suspect that he just might.

The gate opened as it had the past week, and the boy came into the courtyard, ducking underneath the unpruned maple branches with traces of hesitation in his step. He wouldn't gain resolve until he was square in the center of the fenced in lot, and seated himself resolute with all the air of a centuries old stone. It grated Miyo. He couldn't chase the boy away. Not after the first time the diminutive, bald, and dressed in rags youth came calling and Miyo, quite lucidly, he remembered, delivered a rousing speech as to why he was no longer taking pupils. The logic was sound, and he was proud to recall that he had resorted to no self depreciation that first time. Nor did the boy leave the second time, where Miyo did indeed resort to self deprecation, caught as he was mid jug, fermented drink damping his work shirt as though he had indeed worked, decrying that this is what would be teaching him: An old washed up drunkard.

The boy still came. Three, four times – hardly speaking, always sitting with precision in the same spot on the grass, now flattened from his presence. On the fifth Miyo assented, and he snatched up a practice sword and tossed it at the boy, who, to the youths credit, caught it half-way gracefully. Miyo took up his own and advanced on unsteady legs toward his hapless, bewildered opponent.

Form took shape naturally. He still remembered. He remembered as he brought the wooden blade to his side, slipped it through his cloth belt as though a sheath, and squared his shoulders, made his body both stiff and loose at once. He came on at a steady angle, body curled, right shoulder aimed at the boys chest. A lifetime of drill, it seemed, could not be erased entirely by a decade of decaying decadence.

The boy scrambled his own sword up right, first holding it out in both hands, far too stiff – Miyo noticed – before reconsidering, and bringing the sword down to his hip in imitation of the old man advancing on him.

Miyo was three steps away. He crossed that in an instant, and with the same motion unsheathed his practice sword and swung. He had been aiming for the boys neck, he realized with a sudden flash of horror, and in the last moment shifted so as to only leave a sweltering bruise on the boys shoulder.

“Well!” Miyo frothed, wooden sword still welded to the boys reddening shoulder. He looked a proper pitiful creature, skin all tight around the skull, eyes darkened pits.

The boy shifted back with a snarl and tried to draw his own weapon. Miyo delivered another quick crack, this time to the boys ribs. The boy tried again. Received another bruise. Again. Again. Finally a crack to the boys wrist had him drop his practice sword. To look into the boys eyes was to see a well of tears, but he wouldn't shed them. The rest of his face was under his control, but only just. His lip quavered, a touch.

Miyo backed off, disgusted. He cried out, devoid of words and full of anguish, of pity. He tossed his sword aside. Took three sharp ragged breaths to gather himself.

“Get you gone then!” and his voice was hoarse with the effort just exerted, with the strain of principles being violated. Principles that he had forgotten he had. To harm someone, to loose control. What a dreadful thing. The room tucked into the back of the dojo, where the shrine to his long deceased father lay, would be avoided with more deliberation than normal. There was an even greater shame today.

The boy winced as he sat himself down on his knees, rubbing for a moment on his ribs and staring blankly. Always staring blankly. Or was there something there in his dark beetle eyes? Past the tears that would not fall? Something Miyo used to seek out, something he would once treasure. Nurture. Mold.

Miyo sucked on his teeth, opened his mouth to shout again and then shook that compulsion away. He couldn't well beat the child to death, and short of that there seemed to be no getting rid of him. So he went for another drink, and he drank that sourly on the steps of his dojo, watching the boy. When the sun fell the youth got up with a bow, and left.

That night he had a lot to think about – and not nearly enough drink left to hash it all out. He brooded like he had never quite brooded before. It felt rotten, to know that he was rotten – that if the boy were to have succeeded in drawing, were he to have succeeded in the even yet more difficult task of landing a solid blow Miyo would have split open and oozed like a peach left somewhere damp and dark for a very long time. He would smell rancid. More so than he did usually.

He didn't bother lighting a candle that night. The darkness fit his mood.

The following day marked the boys sixth visit.

“Do you think you'll impress me?” Miyo sneered, squinting against the light, trying to merge the two boys that he was seeing into one. His voice, he hoped, was clear and sharp – not slurred.

The boy blinked.

“What's your name then? Huh! What's the name of my determined little interloper?”

“I am Sai,” the boy said, inclining his head, hands on his lap.

“And why come to me, Sai? There's other schools. There's plenty of other schools.”

“There are none,” Sai said at a whisper. That seemed to be his default volume, that of leaves rustling during a soft spring breeze.

“What's that?”

“I said there are none. None that would take me.” Sai raised his head, and for a moment looked defiant. This was soon washed away. Replaced by calm, or something else. The glint in his eye, it was there.

Miyo rubbed the stubble on his chin, cast his head up to look at the cobwebs of his ceiling. He snapped his fingers and his attention back on Sai.

“Kurobe. Kurobe has a dojo, he'll take you. He'll take anyone.” Miyo laughed and drunkenly shook his head, “anyone at all.”

He muttered to himself – half lost in reminiscences. Kurobe was an old friend seldom seen. Not half bad on the mats, but no great talent for it either. No, his strength lay in his big heart, big as it must have been to pump blood through that whole immense frame. His home and school often filled with urchins, those children left over from what had then seemed unceasing wars.

“Master Kurobe is dead. His school is no more.”

Miyo's smile slipped.

Dead?

“When?”

“I do not know. His dojo is barred. The neighbors told me he had died.”

Miyo scrambled up. “What of his sons? They should still be practicing, they can't be dead too, can they?”

Sai stared. He did not know.

Letting out a long gust Miyo all but collapsed back onto the floor.

“Old Kurobe dead...”

He shook his head, meant to be done once, a decisive if dramatic gesture to expel bleak thoughts. But he kept on shaking it. Tears welled up. Who – what else then, had changed? The long vacant years came back at him with the force of a bull, so dull and full of nothing but head swirling drink and waiting and longing and thinking to seem as nothing of consequence, as life as routine – but time was passing. It certainly was passing.

Tears fell on the back of his wrinkled hands, tendons straining with tense grip. He felt a wail coming on, and could not stop it. He collapsed in on himself, sobbing openly. Ugly hiccups. Sounds fit for no place but somewhere wreathed in solitude. Not the bright of midday with an audience.

Sai waited patiently.

He did not remark.

The wind rustled the blood red of the maple tree, displaced some leaves.