The Red Shark - Chapter 0007

Chapter 7 — The First Training

I fell asleep on the night of my fourth birthday with cake in my stomach and ink under my fingernails. The mothers had asked me to write one more line of calligraphy before bed, and I had been vain enough to do it.

I woke up being dragged out of bed by one foot.

A hand had closed around my ankle. Before I understood whose it was, the blanket was gone, my back was sliding across the mattress, and then there was nothing under me but the stone floor. The cold went straight through my sleeping tunic. My heart was beating so fast it hurt.

“Get up,” my father said. “It starts today.”

From the floor, he was mostly legs. I had to tip my head all the way back to find the rest of him. His skin was the same gray-blue as mine. His black hair hung past his shoulders in knots no comb had ever beaten, and an old scar cut down through his left eyebrow and across the lid. The hilt of his sword stood up over his right shoulder, and he was stooping a little so it wouldn’t scrape the ceiling.

In four years he had never once come into my room. I could count our conversations on my fingers, and most of them had been shorter than this one.

I got up.

He didn’t wait for me to find my sandals. His hand went around my upper arm with room to spare, and he walked me out into the corridor at a pace that had me half running. The lanterns had burned down to almost nothing. Nobody else was awake, or if they were, they had the sense to stay behind their doors. He limped slightly on his left leg, a small hitch every other step that I’d never noticed from a distance. It didn’t slow him down at all.

My body was terrified. That was one of the stranger things about being what I was. A four-year-old’s body could panic all by itself while the man inside it took notes. And the man couldn’t find much to be afraid of. I hadn’t broken any rules lately, or none that anyone knew about. That left one reason for my father to come for me before dawn, and once I’d thought of it, I stopped minding the cold.

We went out the back of the compound, past the courtyard where my brothers trained, past the storehouses, and through a door in the outer wall that I’d always assumed was locked. On the other side was a field nobody had ever shown me.

It was a rough rectangle of ground boxed in by stone walls twice my father’s height, green with moss almost to the top. The ground had never been leveled. Stones the size of my head stuck out of the mud, the night’s rain had left puddles everywhere, and a wooden bar was set between two posts near the middle. At the far end, where the ground sloped down, there was a pond, dark and very still.

When he let go of my arm, I stumbled, caught myself, and stood there barefoot in the mud while he looked me over as if I were a tool he was thinking of buying.

“You are Akashio,” he said. “The clan is mine. I built it.”

I waited. He seemed to be choosing his words, which I had never seen him do.

“I was born a bastard. My mother was a geisha who didn’t keep me. My father was a Hoshigaki I never met, and his clan never wanted me.” He said it the way someone reads out an inventory. “I fought in the wars. I did what the village needed done. The Mizukage gave me the right to found a clan, and I founded one. You are part of it.”

He shifted his weight off the bad leg.

“Family is the only thing worth having. I didn’t have one, so I made one.” His eyes stayed on me. “The Hoshigaki blood makes us grow fast. Strong muscles, joints that can take punishment. All my sons have it.” He paused. “You have something more.”

“More what?”

He didn’t answer, and his face made it clear that asking twice would be a mistake. I thought of my mother’s red hair, and of a few things I had half-guessed about her and never said out loud.

“Your training starts today. Your brothers have done well. Daigo graduated from the Academy at ten. Most boys are thirteen.” He let that sink in. “I expect the same from you. More, if you have it.”

He started me on stretching, which looked like nothing. Arms up, bend, reach for the toes. He did it with me, which was a strange thing to watch, a man that size folding in half in the mud with the sword hilt bobbing behind his head. My muscles were stiff from sleep and complained at every position. He didn’t hurry me.

Push-ups came next, on my knees. “Push the ground like it’s the enemy.” My arms started shaking at seven and gave out at eleven. He waited until I’d caught my breath and told me to do eleven more.

After that, laps. Barefoot, through mud that grabbed at my heels, and through puddles I stopped trying to avoid after the third one. The bar was last. He lowered it on its pegs until I could reach it on my toes, and I hung there and pulled, and my chin came nowhere near the wood. On the fourth try, I let a little chakra run down into my arms, the way I’d been doing under my blanket for two years. Not much. Just enough to take the edge off the burning. My chin touched the bar.

If he noticed, he didn’t say so.

“The Hoshigaki body grows quickly,” he said while I dangled. “The muscle comes early. The joints harden early. It hurts more than it would for an ordinary child.” He watched my arms shake. “Pain teaches. Learn, and keep going.”

By the time he let me drop, my legs were trembling and the sky had gone from black to gray. I thought that had been the training. My father, it turned out, thought it had been the warm-up.

“Run,” he said. “Until I tell you to stop.”

He took a pocket watch out of his vest, opened it, and didn’t look at me again for a long time.

I ran. The first hour was bad in the ordinary way, with a stitch in my side, mud, and a cold drizzle that came and went. The second hour was bad in a way I hadn’t felt since I was someone else, carrying a pack across sand that ran all the way to the horizon. My legs stopped feeling like mine. I fell twice, and the second time I took a long while getting up.

There was no water. I kept waiting for him to offer some, and he kept not offering it. By midday my mouth tasted like an old nail and my tongue felt too big for it. Nobody mentioned food. My stomach growled for a while and then gave up, which worried me more.

At some point I noticed heads along the top of the wall near the storehouse roof, three or four small ones, watching. The next time I came around, they were gone. My father had turned his head.

I kept the chakra moving. It was the one thing I had that he hadn’t given me. Since I was two, I had been teaching myself to keep a thin, steady current running through my body without anyone noticing, first with leaves and later with pebbles stuck to my skin under my shirt from morning to night. Now I let that current run into my legs and my lungs. It didn’t do much. I was still slow, and everything still hurt. But every time I was sure I was about to stop, I found a little more left in me than there should have been.

The sun, wherever it was behind the clouds, went over and started down the other side. I was running more slowly than a grown man walks, but I was running.

When he finally closed the watch and said, “Stop,” I didn’t so much stop as fall over.

He let me lie in the mud for about ten breaths.

“Up,” he said. “Now the forms.”

The kata were the forms our village fought with, and he showed me the first of them slowly, then at full speed. A straight punch from the hip that made a small, flat crack in the air. An elbow that came in short and low. A sweep aimed at the back of the knee. Nothing went higher than it needed to, and nothing was there for show.

“Konoha has its pretty styles,” he said. “The ones with the red eyes. The Hyūga, tapping at people with two fingers like they’re testing fruit at the market.” He spat to one side. “We don’t tap. We break the bone, tear the muscle, go for the organ. Short and fast. Done right, the other man doesn’t get up.”

Uchiha, my old life supplied. I kept my face blank.

I copied him. My arms were so tired that my first punches were barely punches, and he corrected each one, with a hand on my shoulder or the side of his foot against my ankle. “Lower.” “Elbow in.” “Not his face. His liver. Here.” He jabbed two fingers into my right side, under the ribs, hard enough that I felt it in my teeth.

The forms went in faster than I expected. Part of that was the adult mind, which knew how to break a movement into pieces and practice the pieces. Part of it was the chakra, which steadied my arms when they shook. The rest I couldn’t explain. After a few dozen repetitions, my body knew where the next movement went before I did.

We stopped when it was too dark to see my feet. The cold had come back with the evening, and I was shaking so hard my teeth clicked together. I remember him saying, “Enough.” I remember the ground tilting, and then a high, swaying view of the field from somewhere near his shoulder, and the smell of him, iron and sweat. After that, nothing.

◆ ◆ ◆

Maluso was waiting outside the boy’s room with a lantern and a jar of salve. From the way she stood, she had been there a while.

She looked at her son, asleep on his father’s shoulder, then up at Isamu. “Did he eat?”

“No.”

“Water?”

“No.”

Her mouth tightened. She stepped aside to let him through and said nothing else, which was one of the things he valued in her.

The boy didn’t wake when Isamu laid him on the bed. His chest rose and fell in short, uneven pulls, and there was mud dried in his red hair and in the creases of his neck.

Isamu had given the same first day to every one of his sons. Daigo had lasted until midday before his legs folded, and he had cried afterward behind the woodpile, where he thought he was alone. Rokuta had cried during, loudly, and kept running anyway, which Isamu respected more than he ever let the boy know. None of them had lasted until dusk, and none had picked up the forms in a single evening.

He hadn’t spent the day watching the boy’s legs. Legs gave out and came back. He had watched the lips and the eyes. Dry lips he could allow. If the eyes had stopped following him, he would have ended it then and there, and they never did. Each time he came around the field, the boy had looked straight at him, like someone keeping count.

It might have been the Hoshigaki blood running thicker in him than in the others, or whatever had come down to him from his mother, the blood Maluso kept hidden. Isamu didn’t know, and didn’t much care. Explanations were for the men who wrote reports. In the field, what counted was what a man could do, and this one, at four, had done more than any of his brothers.

He stayed in the doorway longer than he needed to. Then he went to wash, and on the way down the dark corridor, where no one could see, he smiled with all of his teeth.