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is always more interesting
    than rehearsal, neh? ” I saw some heads nod ruefully. In more
    than one face, I saw a dawning gratitude that someone else had
    been selected to serve as a training partner. Yamashita moved
    toward the man I had put on the floor. He got up, but I knew
    that he wasn’t going to be able to use his right arm for a while.
    His eyes bore into mine. For the first time that day, I let my
    own eyes bore back into a trainee’s eyes. Shoulda used the kote,
    bud.
    Yamashita watched the silent exchange. “What we have
    seen here is a lesson with two aspects. Like a sword blade, there
    are two sides, omote and ura, the front and the back, the obvi-
    ous and the hidden.” He canted the wooden sword in his hand
    to show one side of the blade, now the other. I saw some frowns
    from the group as they failed to follow his logic.
    Yamashita saw it, too. He sighed. “ Omote. Burke Sensei has
    clearly demonstrated how the technique you began to train this
    morning can be finished in a match. It is not the only applica-
    tion, perhaps,” he said and paused to give me a subtly arch look,
    “perhaps not even the most elegant. But certainly effective.”
    Heads nodded, and Yamashita stood there for a minute,
    saying nothing. The lights of the dojo made the wooden floor
    gleam and, if they seemed to make his eyes deeper and darker,
    they also made his shaven head shine in imitation of the hard
    surfaces of his world.
    Finally, someone raised a hand. “Yamashita Sensei,” the
    question came. “What was the second lesson?”
    My teacher looked up and regarded the expectant circle
    of trainees. He smiled slightly. “Ah. The hidden lesson?” He
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    Kage
    looked around. “You spent all your time waiting for me. Doing
    what Burke Sensei said, but waiting for me. The wise warrior
    keeps himself hidden, in the shadows. Kage. You know the
    word?” Heads nodded.
    “Just so,” my master finished. “My pupil keeps himself in
    shadow. Like most people, there is more to him than meets the
    eye.”
    The lesson was over.
    31
    3
    Tales
    I was talking to a bunch of mystery writers about the reali-
    ties of fighting: how it works and the toll it takes. And how
    long it takes to recover. The overfed guy was incredulous.
    “A week!” he protested, his eyes blinking in outrage. The
    conference room was a soothing beige and the hotel’s mam-
    moth air conditioning units kept the desert heat from seeping
    into the building, but I felt a bit warm anyway. The fluores-
    cent ceiling lights played on the lenses of the man’s round steel-
    rimmed glasses. He had a big mustache that helped balance out
    his jowls and he held a hardcover book to his breast, front cover
    out, so everyone could see. Look. This is mine. I wrote it.
    I nodded and held my hands up to calm him. “A week to
    ten days,” I repeated. The rest of the audience murmured in
    displeasure as well.
    “But I can’t have my main character laid up for that long,”
    the writer continued. “It would destroy the pacing of the novel!”
    I nodded in sympathy. “Sure.” But it seemed that they
    wanted something more from me. I looked around the con-
    ference room at the fifty or so people whose eyes were sharp-
    ened in concern. I began again. “I’m not telling you how to
    write your books,” I pointed out. “But the fact is, when you a
    take a good beating, you can figure that you’re going to be like
    the walking wounded for at least a week. Trust me, in the real
    world, people don’t take punishment like that and bounce back
    right away.”
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    Kage
    They were all deeply disturbed. They had been raised on
    Hollywood’s version of combat. Most had never been in a real
    fight. You could probably stun three quarters of the people in
    the room into immobility with nothing more lethal than a
    good hard slap to the face. These folks were mystery writers.
    Their fictional activity dragged them over just a little into my
    world but its rules didn’t mesh well