The day after I heard Old Gon’s story, I asked him to introduce me to a swordsmith. I wanted to bring a katana back to the current Yosogi School, the inheritors of Yuzuriha Yosogi’s legacy.
Technically speaking, the Yosogi School wasn’t literally descended from her. Kaeha and her children weren’t descendants of Yuzuriha Yosogi, but her younger brother. Also, the current Yosogi School used a long straight sword—a weapon quite different from a katana—and had developed techniques with that in mind. I used to think that presenting them with a katana might just sow confusion.
But now I realized that the change in their weapon of choice meant there must be some techniques that had been lost. They could choose which they would use themselves.
When the Yosogi School first put down roots in Ludoria, they had given up the katana in favor of the straight sword because that was the weapon they could get their hands on. Now, things were different. If I learned how to make katana from the swordsmiths here and then brought that knowledge back to the smiths in Ludoria, the Yosogi School would be able to use them again. They would have the option to choose.
Beyond that, understanding the differences between the two types of swords might lead to the creation of new techniques. Or perhaps I should say it would lead to it. This was the Yosogi School, after all.
Though he hesitated at first, Old Gon eventually introduced me to an old smith named Sakuji. He was younger than Old Gon, yet still old enough that he could have retired from blacksmithing years ago. Even so, he still worked in the forge, focused mainly on teaching new students.
At first, Sakuji—or Old Saku—seemed reluctant to suddenly take on a new student who was not only a foreigner, but also a member of a race he had never seen before. However, when he learned I was an accomplished smith on the mainland, his attitude completely changed. After all, I had spent just as many years in the forge as he had, even though a great deal of it had been done while traveling. I was plenty confident in the skills my decades of experience had developed.
So instead of taking me on as a student, Old Saku declared I was to be his guest. In exchange for teaching me how the smiths in Fusou worked, he wanted me to show him the techniques from the mainland. It was an exchange of knowledge. I was a little bit surprised by the request, but it was an intriguing idea that worked perfectly into my plans.
Normally, one would expect something like the production of katana to be a closely guarded secret. But instead of being kicked out the door, I was invited in to trade skills. It seemed the attitude of cooperation fostered by their war against the oni had become deeply ingrained in the culture of Fusou. It’s kind of a weird way of putting it, but it was like the war had driven the kingdom into a state of open-minded acceptance.
A new student learning to make swords would need to spend at least five years learning the basics, and would begin work as a mere assistant. However, since I was here on the pretense of an exchange of knowledge and not as a student, and because I was already a skilled smith—albeit in a different style of blacksmithing than they were used to—we immediately moved to teaching.
I imagined it was quite an aggravating sight to the other students in the forge, but after declaring me his guest, they were quite polite and sincere with me—and dare I say, avaricious. Every minute Old Saku spent teaching me, and every second I spent showing him the techniques used on the mainland, they were crowded around as close as they could get without interfering, absorbing every scrap of knowledge they could get their hands on.
Humans were wont to lose themselves in greed, forgetting how to live in harmony with others and bringing harm to those around them. But that greed could also serve to drive them ever onward and upward. Of course, humans weren’t the only ones who acted this way, but it was one of the striking traits of their race. It’s one of the things I liked most about them.
The material they used to make swords here was a steel forged from iron sand. Old Saku began by teaching me how to make it, as well as how to determine the quality of the steel produced.
Both harder and softer steels had their uses. The shell steel that would make up the blade’s edge would need to be hard, while the core of the weapon needed to be soft. He taught me how they layered the steel, and how they heated it while they were forging. They made use of the ashes of burnt straw and even mud. The next step was folding the steel over. The harder shell steel was then wrapped around the softer core steel and forged together. Finally, the blade is cooled, with the blunt edge insulated more to make the sharp edge expand faster and create a curved shape. There was a lot of overlap between their techniques and mine, but in the same vein, there were many points that were totally different.
As I learned about swordsmithing from Old Saku, I reached a conclusion about a previous question I’d had. The techniques Oswald taught me to make katana had likely come from the dwarves who had analyzed a completed weapon and tried to reproduce it themselves. That was the impression I got now that I knew how both sides operated.
Though it was just speculation on my part, I wondered if the fleeing students of the Yosogi School had made contact with the dwarves in Ludoria and asked them for help setting down roots there. In exchange for their services, they could have provided some of their own katana as gifts to them. The ancestors of the Yosogi School were swordsmen, not blacksmiths, so even if they had possessed swords of their own, they would have had no knowledge of how to actually make them.
The dwarves would have had to reverse engineer the creation of the katana...and it seemed like they hadn’t fully succeeded. That thought was exciting to me. As old a story as it was, that meant here in the Far East, I was now learning the unique skills needed to craft these weapons that those old dwarves sought, but could never attain. I could only imagine the frustration on Oswald’s face when he’d hear about this.
I would have to learn the methods used here absolutely perfectly in preparation for that day. Just remembering wasn’t enough. I needed to break it down, swallow, and digest it, making it into a skill of my own.