The Night Itself Read Free Page B

it out, sending up clouds of dust that made him cough and sputter, but didn’t stop him from using the pry-bar to bust off the massive padlock holding the box closed. The shriek of metal seemed to echo around the dim space for hours as he bent to open the lid. His tall, lean body went utterly still again for a moment. This was a different kind of stillness. I couldn’t say how I knew that. I just did.
    Finally Ojiichan let out a long sigh. He folded himself down in front of the box and turned his head and beckoned to me. All the tension – tension I hadn’t even really noticed before – was gone out of his face. Lines smoothed away. Eyes lit up not with laughter but something else that I didn’t know the name for. He looked completely relaxed. Happy.
    “Mio, come here, love. Come and see this.”
    I gingerly picked my way towards him, trying to squash a disloyal feeling that playing in Auntie Fumi’s garden with Benjy would have been way more fun than this. I peered over his shoulder. All I could see were layers and layers of thin, brittle-looking fabric starting to go yellow with age and covered in faded embroidery. The embroidered words were Japanese, I thought, although I couldn’t read them. What was it? A dress, maybe? Why would Ojiichan care about that?
    “What is it?” My voice, bouncing off the low ceiling, sounded too loud.
    He reached into the box and folded back the material.
    And everything changed.
    Drifting dust turned to gold in the shafts of sun coming through the dirty skylight. The air around me – the
insides
of me – filled with a high, musical singing that made my hair stand on end and my bones hum and my veins tingle. I knew exactly what I was looking at. A Japanese long sword.
    Katana…
    “Do you like him?” Ojiichan asked.
    I nodded wordlessly, my heart stuttering so fast it was hard to breathe.
    “Would you like to hold him?”
    I nodded again.
    Ojiichan lifted the glittering black-and-gold shape out of the box. He carefully eased the curving black sheath, covered with golden flowers, from the blade. “Careful now, Mio. He’s heavy. That’s right, both hands together.”
    The sword should have been cold, but it wasn’t. The black silk hilt wrappings were warm against my chilled palms. Warm as a living thing.
    “Oh,” I sighed. “It’s so… It’s … beautiful.” Beautiful wasn’t the right word. But I didn’t have the right word for what it was.
    The singing inside me reached out, and I could feel the sword respond to it. The metal started to sing too, throwing the feeling back to me until my whole body resounded with it. Energy pulsed where my hands gripped the hilt – pulsed with the same rhythm as my heart.
    “He is yours, Mio,” Ojiichan said.
    Mine?
    It felt like the time I’d pushed the roundabout too fast and gone flying off, only this time instead of landing with a hard, painful bump and skinning my elbows and knees, I carried on flying. Ojiichan put a steadying arm around my shoulders, telling me it was all right, it was all right, it would pass in a minute, just breathe…
    “This sword has been in the Yamato family for five hundred years,” he said. His voice was barely a whisper, even though there was no one to overhear us. “He has been passed from one Yamato heir to the next on their sixteenth birthday, without fail, for nearly ten generations. This sword is the greatest treasure and the greatest burden of our family.”
    Treasure?
Mum and Dad had taken me to see the Crown Jewels once. I would have swapped every pretty, glittery jewel in those glass cases for what I held in my hands now. But what was so amazing was that I didn’t have to. Because this was ours. It belonged to us. To
me
.
    Mine
.
    Even with Ojiichan holding me and the tip of the blade resting against the edge of the metal box, my arms were already trembling. My muscles burned. But I could not – would not – let go.
    Ojiichan was speaking again: “We don’t know everything about