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@@ -237,9 +237,9 @@ With the fire going her father and Kobayashi began setting up the final element Everyone aboard *Wanderer* was expect to wrestle. Skilled wrestling, which Kobayashi insisted should be called Jujutsu, was the only practical self defense on a ship. The deck of a ship is a crowded place. Coiled lines are everywhere, capstands, booms, rigging, railings, and dozens of other things scattered about make wielding a sword difficult. As her father told it, the ship he and the others had served together on was attacked by pirates off the coast of Batavia. While others swung swords wildly, rarely hitting their mark, Kobayashi came bounding out of the hold unarmed, but began ducking and weaving around the deck, knocking people out, flinging them overboard, and occasionally killing them, all without ever touching a weapon. Later, after the boarding party was repelled, and the ship out of harms way, her father had pulled Kobayashi aside and asked him to teach him how to fight like he had fought. This was the beginning of their friendship. Once trained her father had become a devotee of the Jujutsu way as Kobayashi explained it and he insisted that everyone, even young Henry, train in Jujutsu. -Lulu watched as her father and Tamba finished staking out the ring. When that last stake was buried they both looked at each and her father gestured to the center. Tamba nodded and stripped off his shirt. Lulu still flinched at the scars on his back every time she saw them. - +Lulu watched as her father and Tamba finished staking out the ring. When that last spike was buried they both looked at each and her father gestured to the center. Tamba nodded and stripped off his shirt. Lulu still flinched at the scars on his back every time she saw them. After shaking hands they began to slowly circle each other with the steady patience of two fighters who knew each other well. Lulu watched as they both visible slowed their breathing, their diaphragms expanding with each inhale. Her father came in first, but he was too hasty, Tamba pulled guard and when her father tried to pass, Tamba reversed him, took the side, mounted, and put him in a collar choke. He tapped three times. It was over so fast Lulu wasn't able to learn much, though she kept thinking that her father had ducked in too soon. Patience, was what he always told her. Know the difference between patience and passivity he said, but sometimes he couldn't see his own impatience. +--- The long afternoon shadows began to race their way across the clearing they'd be calling home for the next six to eight months. Lulu turned and looked west. A little back from camp there was a line of oak trees that then gave way to the marsh where Wanderer would be anchored for the season. In the shade of those oaks they would soon construct great kilns that would be used to make the tar that brought them to the island in the first place. Across the flat reedy world of marsh was another line of oaks and then a no man's land of cypress swamp and brackish water that slowly, as you moved south, resolved itself into the southern fork of the Edisto River. Beyond that were the great pine forests of the low country where they would dig stumps and then haul them by barge and horse out here to the beach where they would burn them, slowly extracting the sap and then boiling it down into a sticky resin that sealed wood against the sea. |