Duarte had been studying Tomas through all of this with a new and more serious attention, as if the applicant had been reclassified in his ledger from an anecdote to a fixture. "Four minutes each," he said. "Scored on control." He shrugged, elegantly. "Agreed, sensei. I only hope your applicant's carpet technique survives contact with an actual syllabus. It would be a shame if the morning's poetry turned out to be—" he searched, courteously, for the least courteous word available, "—improvisation."
"It would," Tomas said. "Yes."
"One more question, Mr. Reiner, before we dress you in other people's courage," Antoniou said. "You could have offered yourself against one of them. Against Mr. Duarte, say — one round, one result, and the morning's honour satisfied all round. Why all three?"
It was the question the whole room had been carrying, and it was a mark of Tomas's strangeness that he answered it as if it were about logistics.
"Because one result is a story, and stories can be explained," he said. "Mr. Duarte would say Mr. Sato would have caught me. Mr. Marsh would say Mr. Duarte wasn't trying. Everyone would keep the opinion they arrived with, and your assessment would have a hole in it exactly my shape." He paused. "Also, it wouldn't be fair to them. I've watched all three of them work this morning. If I only faced one, the other two would have to spend the rest of the year not knowing. That's a discourtesy. Men shouldn't be left with homework like that."
Duarte, to his own visible surprise, laughed — really laughed, once, and shook his head.
"Homework," he said. "He's worried about our homework. Sensei, your applicant is either the politest man in Fenwick or the most arrogant, and I genuinely cannot tell which, and I have decided I want to find out on the mat rather than in conversation."
"That," Antoniou said, "is the first entirely sensible thing anyone has said since nine o'clock."
Antoniou looked between them, and then, unexpectedly, he smiled — a private, complicated smile, there and gone.
"There remains the question of dress," he said. "Mr. Reiner has no gi."
"I have one he can borrow," Hannah said, from the whiteboard, surprising everyone including herself. "Lost property. Washed. There's a white belt with it that nobody ever claimed." She shrugged at the row of raised eyebrows. "What? It's an academy. Half my cupboard is other people's courage."
The borrowed gi was too broad in the shoulder and too short in the leg, and the white belt — someone's beginning, abandoned at a bus stop or a crossroads in a life — went around Tomas twice and tied, and he stood for a moment with his hands resting on the knot, quite still. Diana would say later that it was the only time all day he looked like a man about to do something difficult. The applicants were rearranged along the wall, off the mats, with their tea and their morning's own assessments suspended — Antoniou had declared the assessment, as a whole, not over but widened, and they were to watch, because watching, he said, was also a form of training they would one day be charged for if he had his way.
The centre mat was cleared. The clock was set where Antoniou could see it without turning his head. Sato stepped out of his shoes at the edge of the tatami, bowed to the mat, bowed to Antoniou, and waited, loose and patient, at the centre line, with the expression of a man who has already solved the problem and is merely attending its demonstration.
The borrowed gi smelled faintly of other people's washing powder and the inside of a cupboard. Standing in it, Tomas was aware of the whole improbability of himself, and aware too that improbability was only ever a description from outside. From inside, there was just the mat, and the man waiting on it, and the particular silence of a roomful of adults holding its breath on his behalf — a silence he recognised, because rooms in workshops and concert halls made it too, in the half-second after an instrument is opened and before the first string is touched. Everything that mattered was about to be audible. He had spent eleven years learning how to hear it.
"Mr. Reiner," Antoniou said.
Tomas bowed at the edge of the mat — correctly, unhurriedly, to the room and then to the man across from him — and stepped onto the blue square where, eleven years and one lifetime of Saturdays away, a nineteen-year-old apprentice had once been taught how to stand.