Jack of All Trade

Jack of All Trade – Chapter 2: The Cold Beginning

Disclaimer: Naruto is not owned by me and neither are these letters...hell nothing is owned by me! What the hell! If everything has to be so called “oh yes I give credit to this blah blah” without the fear of being sued then I say I give credit to where credits due. Damnit all I’m getting myself a drink of sake!


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Point Of View: Uchiha Sasuke

They took me out of the mist country on a Sunday in a truck loaded with other children. I planned my escape from the truck so I could start back to the city in hopes of finding my mother.

We had ridden out of the city in the dump bed of a sand-and-gravel type of truck. We drove in the darkness, the thump of the truck’s old pistons keeping pace with the artillery the invaders were using to rain death all night upon the city. When the sun came up, Sound bombers would join the murderous assault.

There were twenty-five or thirty of us, boys and girls, all under thirteen years old, bundled in winter coats and packed into the truck bed. Haku, a girl beside me, trembled as artillery shells pounded a district the truck rumbled through. Like all of us she was pale and bone-thin. We spent two days together back at the departure station and I knew that she had lost both her parents. Some had lost their entire families, mother and father, brothers and sisters, even grandparents. A few who mothers had died still had fathers fighting at the front.

“Why...why do they hate us?” she asked.

Her question was barely audible. It wasn’t meant to be heard, anyway. We were all weak and tired from months of hunger and sometimes thoughts just dribbled off our lips like drips from a leaky faucet.

“They...they don’t hate us,” I said. “They think we’re animals. People kill animals.”

That was what my mother had told me. The Sound thought of themselves as the superiors and the people of the mist as animals that could be bred and trained to serve them. But first they had to kill enough of us so the rest obeyed.

“They think they can whip us like dogs, that we will just lie down and whimper,” my mother had said. Our people had staggered from blows but had not fallen. Some people said we fought too hard, that if we just gave up they would kill fewer of us. “But then they would be right,” my mother had said, “We will not be human.”

A light drizzle of ice followed us out of the city. As I sat on the cold metal truck bed, rocking back and forth as the truck went from one rut to another, I thought about what it was like the year before, a time before the war started. I thought about how I greeted the first snow of winter with laughter and glee, of snowball fights and a trip to the country where we rode on a horse-drawn sled.

That was before...before the invaders came, before hunger and cold death stalked us, a time when we went to a warm bed with our bellies full, a time before the entire world had turned rabid.

The barbaric creatures from Sound had come in August, destroying everything that stood in their way. The Sound called their sudden, overwhelming attacks with a gigantic arsenal of military weapons and vehicles “Bum Rush”. Neither the soldiers nor the generals had experienced anything like the mechanized fighting units that came at them like a storm of murderous steel demons from the plateau of hell. The brutal war machine sent the troops reeling back. The armies were crushed by this bum rush, trampled beneath the onslaught of steel and bullets. The Sound’s advance did not stop until they were at the suburbs of the capital-Mizuha.

We heard rumors that some of the immigrants, rebels, and a even a few or the prominent citizens of Mist had greeted these invaders as liberators, assuming that they would be an improvement over the regime we lived under, but soon those whispers of glee were replaced by ones of horror as word spread of atrocities committed by the conquerors.

That invasion began a few months ago, and the war had raged on, with Mizuha violated and abused by the struggle between ruthless armies. The Horsemen of the Apocalypse rode with the invaders, malevolent storms of death, disease and famine gripping the capital as a violent winter lashed the city while enemy artillery and bombs rained murder from the skies.

The worse fate was not to die quickly from the explosion of a bomb or murderous shrapnel from artillery-it was to die slowly of starvation and lost hope, as you watched family, friends and neighbors wither and drop like leaves on a dying tree.

Have you ever seen anyone starve to death? Have you seen someone you love get thinner and weaker everyday, fading like sand slipping between your fingers, too weak to keep the flame of life glowing? That was how my mother was when they pulled me away from her, pale and weak, sand slipping between my fingers. That was the only thing lingering in my mind. I had to get off this truck that was carrying me out of the city, further away from my mother, and make my way back to help her.

A man by the name of Peter had built the city atop rivers and swamps two and a half centuries earlier with the Mist Sea on the west and Lake Lagoon, the largest lake within the province, to the east. The Sound had not been able to completely surround the city because of the two bodies of water. But the Mist Sea was no help to us because the Sound navy would be waiting for our ships if they tried to leave the harbor. Besides, the sea froze in the winter, trapping our fleet anyway, making the ships sitting ducks for the Sound fighter planes and bombers that swarmed overhead.

But the lake was different. When winter howled, the lake froze in places solid enough for trucks to cross under the cover of darkness. Daredevil runs by truckers carried a little food into the city and children out, the drivers praying for moonless nights as they raced across the frozen lake to the military forces on the other side.

I didn’t know how far we were from the city when the truck stopped. We had left late at night and drove slowly with the truck lights off, but we never made it across the lake. We had to stop because enemy fire had hit a convoy earlier and the burning bulks were blocking the road. Once the debris were removed, we would have to wait for night to fall again because we wouldn’t have time to get across the lake before the sun rose, making the truck an easy target for the enemy that would scream overhead.

“We wait for darkness,” the driver told us, after he pulled the truck to the side of the road and got out. “Otherwise we have no chance of making it.”

No one said a word. We huddled under a stiff white canvas used as a camouflage and waited for our ration.

The driver brought a cotton duffle bag out of the cab and set it on the snow. He opened one end of the bag to expose long loaves of bread. It was black bread, coarse and usually with a little sawdust added at the plants to increase the number of loaves. No one cared about the taste. We would have eaten dirt if we were told it was nourishing.

Drawing out a loaf at a time, he tore off pieces and handed them up to us. Each of us watched the driver intently, waiting for our piece. A few months ago, it would have been a piece of bread, not very inviting, perhaps not even eaten because it didn’t come with a slab of butter with sweetened fruit. Now a little bread was life itself.

“Roast chicken and noodle soup” he said, as he carefully tore off a portion.

It was his idea of humor. I could not remember what a piece of chicken or a bowl of noodles tasted like. The words didn’t even make my mouth water. Starvation had left my body numb. No one around me smiled at the words, either.

Over two million people were in the city when the war started. Five months ago the streets were filled with cars and trucks and trolleys, the sidewalks crowded with people rushing and bustling, talking and arguing, leaving trials of cigarette smoke behind them and sometimes beer fumes. Half of the people in the city, a million souls, had died, mostly from hunger. It was now a quiet city-when the bombs and shells weren’t raining-cold and quiet with snow covering everything, with few nonmilitary vehicles moving, no trams or trains rattling down tracks, no chatter of conversation on the streets, no loud voices, not even the smell of cigarette smoke in the crisp clean winter air as you walked past people on the sidewalks. A city of people with white, haggard faces, people without smiles and hope, without light in their eyes-people who would surrender without a fight when death came knocking.

“Walking, breathing ghosts,” my mother called the children and people of Mizuha. “The flesh is gone from our bodies and all that if left is a little bit of our soul. When we give up the spirit, we don’t even get to go to heaven because we are godless people.”

She hadn’t always talked like that, critical of the regime. In the old days, before war clouds gathered, the three of us-my mother, father and me-would sit together in our warm little apartment. For a citizen of Mist, I had an unusual pedigree-a Kakihao(1) Jewish mother and a father who was half Konohao(2) and half Sunahao(3).

We lived on the third floor of a walkup and had two rooms-a kitchen-living room combination and a bedroom. There would be hot food on the stove and bread in the oven. We’d laugh and talk about books and movies and my day at school, but the two of them were careful not to discuss their feelings about work or the government in front of me. From a child’s point of view, such parental secrecy was the reason someone invented the keyhole.

Sometimes I shut my eyes and tried to remember every detail of those days before the war, hearing in my mind once again the sound of their laughter, the smell of my mother’s cooking, the warmth and comfort and security we shared before the mines of men were afflicted by the madness of death and conquest.

We were entitled to three ounces of bread as our ration. It looked like less than three ounces was being torn off for each of us, but I said nothing and neither did anyone else. To speak up might result in no ration. None of us had any extra fat on our bodies to keep us going if we were not given at least a little food.

Even with many night convoys getting through, only a fraction of the food necessary to support the city was brought in. And no fuel for heat came in at all. Hundreds of thousands of people who were not killed by the bombardments froze and starved.

After he handed out the ration of bread, the driver passed out letters that had been sent to the station in the city where we children had been assembled to await our turn to be evacuated. He shouted, “Uchiha Sasuke!”

I went forward and got a small sheet of paper bearing the letterhead of a Mist Hospital. A smudged scribble read, “Happy birthday, my son, mother loves you.”

I was eleven years old today. It was not my mother’s handwriting, nor was the simple signature, Mother, in her hand.

Haku stared at the note in my hand. “It’s not my mother’s handwriting,” I said. “She’s too weak to write it, or even sign it. An attendant in the hospital must have wrote it.”

“My mother is dead,” she said in a fragile voice. “I don’t know where my father is. He was sent to fight the barbarians.”

Her eyes were blank. She wasn’t talking to me. I think she was remembering, perhaps the warm arms of her mother, her father’s strong hug, a big pot of hot soup on the stove.

I stared at the note. The simple message created dread in me. If my mother was too weak to even sign the note, she would die soon. The dead and the dying were things I knew about, things all the children in the city had firsthand knowledge of.

“She’s going to die,” I told Haku. She stared at me with blank eyes. She was going to die, too, I thought. She had given up hope.

I climbed off the back and went to the truck cab. I grabbed the door handle and used the running board to step up and knock on the window.

The driver was chewing on a piece of meat. A loaf of bread lay across his lap. It was his week’s ration. And he got it by chiseling a little off from each of us. If he was caught, he would be summarily shot. If he was caught plunging a knife into someone’s heart, he would get a trial and imprisonment. But to take bread from another’s mouth earned the death penalty without a trial.

He saw me looking at the big chunk of bread. He rolled down the window, his expression ugly.

“I have to return to the city,” I told him. He stared at me as if I’d just told him that I needed to go to Mars.

“Fuck your mother, what are you talking about?” The expression he used was not a slight to my mother, but the standard street expletive for anger and exasperation. Before the war, I heard it once in school. Now it was almost a common salutation.

“Get back on the truck,” he said, “before I take you to the Haymarket, you little bastard.”

I jumped down from the cab and went back and crawled under the canvas next to Haku. No one had moved or even shifted position.

The driver didn’t have to explain his threat. The Haymarket was the place in the city where a black market in food and other things were conducted. People brought family heirlooms to the market-jewels and art and fine furs left from before the revolution twenty five years ago-to sell them for a little a little meat or a few ounces of grain stolen by gangs of food thieves. Physical possession, heirlooms, fine watches, gems, wads of rubles-none of it had the value of food. On good days, the meat was horsemeat. Dogs, cats and rats had been devoured early. Work horses weren’t slaughtered until they fell.

Like the Stone Age, where fire, shelter and the day’s kill meant survival, the siege of Mizuha had taken the city back to the most basic fundamentals of human survival.

A common joke was that a Faberge egg worth a king’s ransom wouldn’t buy a dozen hen eggs. People said that there was trade in a stranger foodstuff than eggs, and that the tender meat of children was preferred over other cuts.

The driver left the cab and joined a group of other truckers who had gathered at a fire started in a metal barrel. They talked as they heated snow for hot water to drink. A few had tea.

I listened to their conversations from the back of the truck.

“Half the city...it’s dead already,” our driver said. He spit, and the spittle turned to ice before it hit the frozen ground. “It’s good people are dying, it leaves more food for the living. Besides, those not strong enough to live need to make way for the rest of us.”

I didn’t think it would be good if my mother died. In some small way I understood that she had been so battered and abused by cold and hunger that death would take her beyond sorrow. But that did not help the ache of loneliness and despair in my heart as I realized that I was the only family she had. I didn’t want her to die alone. I needed to get to her, be at her side, and tell her that I didn’t want her to die.

After he finished drinking hot water with the other truckers, our driver climbed back into the cab, no doubt covering himself with a fur blanket.

The children huddled together in the back of the truck, shivering under the oiled canvas tarp as light snow fell. There no laughter, no jokes, no talking. We were all too cold, too numb from months of shock and hunger to do little more than sit quietly. My mother said that the children of Mizuha no longer laughed or even smiled. But I saw hopelessness in the eyes and on the faces of everyone on the streets, not just the young. Hopelessness, helplessness, and even surrender. So many horrors confronted us each day that our minds balked at accepting anymore. There was a time early in the siege when people cried and complained, but no one had the energy anymore for anger or grief. There were neither tears nor smiles. The deprivations had created not just a grim gravity in everyone, but in some people, like our people and the black marketers who specialized in exotic meats, it had brought out a cruel streak.

Or maybe the driver’s attitude was just a human survival instinct. Perhaps if I had been the biggest and strongest, I would have cut the rations of the others to make sure my belly was full. Hunger was a strange new sensation for all of us. At first it was an urgent growling in my stomach, then a feeling of light-headedness and even increased energy. But the shot of energy lasted only a short time. In its stead came the sickness of starvation, a lack of strength that made getting out of bed and walking across a room a chore. The final stage was weakness and a dull ache that engulfed my whole body, a vague pain gripping my entire body that never went away, that made even thinking difficult.

I saw the starvation disease all around me, at first in the very old and very young, and then slowly infecting everyone-they became confused, dull-witted, and lethargic. People collapsed in the streets, some convulsing in seizures, others just sitting down to quietly die. An old woman who lived in our apartment building just sat down on the front steps and never got up again, passing into a coma and then to the sanctuary of death.

My mother said that God was on the side of the Sound because He sent icy storms to make our hungry more miserable.

It was strange to hear her talk of God. Officially, God did not exist in the country of Mist.

At the evacuation station where we were held before being placed in the back of the truck for the lake crossing, we were given an ounce of bread and a cup of hot water with salt for breakfast. At lunchtime, we received two ounces of bread, a spoon of butter, a bowl of soup made from frozen beets and a little linseed-oil cake. Many of us who still had parents or siblings poured half of the soup into a jam jar and threw in other scraps and took the food back to them because they were starving. I took my jar each day to hospital where my mother lay on the floor on a mattress. There was no more food in the hospital than other places in the city, each patient getting only the starvation ration of three ounces of bread a day. I helped her into a sitting position and made her drink the liquid.

Now I felt the jar beneath my coat. I had put half of my soup and bread in the jar, intending to take it to my mother at the hospital, but hadn’t gotten the chance because we were suddenly locked up. The supervisor at the evaluation station realized that some of us would run away to returned to our parents rather than be shipped out. He was right about me. Had I known I would be transported from the city, I would have run away to be with my mother. As soon as lunch was over, he locked us in a room, held prisoner until night hell and we were loaded into the truck.

I shut my eyes and tried to go to sleep. The stronger children pushed their way back in the truck to get more heat from the surrounding bodies, but I deliberately stayed on the outer edge and curled into a fetal position to keep as much body heat as I could.

When the first crack of light arrived, I slipped off the back of the truck.

I was driven not only by my own need for my mother, but to save her after what she had done for me. I overheard a nurse at the hospital say my mother was weak because she had slipped me a little of her own bread ration each day. To help me survive, she had sacrificed herself.

As I walked down the frozen road I realized that if my mother died, I would be all alone in the world.


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(1)People of Fire: Kakihao
(2)People of Leaf: Konohao
(3)People of Sand: Sunahao


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Author's Note: I'll update this early or late depending on my mood...