Read Runaway Horses for Free Online

white pendant attached to young Iinuma’s back flashed in the sunlight, and the same instant Honda heard the sound of a crashing blow. The boy from the red team had taken it upon the mask.
    The spectators applauded. Young Iinuma had eliminated one of the opposition. Now as he faced another man from the red team, first squatting down, then swiftly drawing his stave from his hip, his virile grace persuaded one that he was already master of his new antagonist. Even to Honda, as little as he knew of kendo, young Iinuma’s perfect form was evident. However violent the action, he maintained his poise throughout, his flawless bearing at each moment fixed in space like a classic pattern cut from blue cloth. He always kept his balance, unhindered by the clinging heaviness of the air. Though for others the atmosphere might be hot, sticky mud, for young Iinuma it seemed a light, congenial element.
    He took a step forward out of the area shaded by the canopy, and his black cuirass shone with the luster of the clear sky above.
    His opponent retreated a step. The blue of his kendo tunic and hakama was faded and uneven from many washings, especially where the cords that secured his cuirass had rubbed against his back to form a worn x-shaped pattern. A bright red pennant was attached here.
    As young Iinuma advanced one step farther, Honda, whose eye was becoming accustomed to the action, recognized the ominous tension the set of his gauntlets conveyed. The forearm visible between the flaring cuffs of the gauntlets and the sleeves of his tunic showed a thickness unexpected in so young a man, the tendons straining beneath the light skin of the inner arms. The white leather of the gauntlet palms shaded into a bluish tint from their cloth backs, color as lyrical as the dawn sky.
    The tips of the two staves moved cautiously together, like the noses of two wary dogs confronting each other.
    “Ee-yaah!” his opponent shouted furiously.
    “Ah-ree-yah, ah-ree-yah, ah-ree-yaah!” young Iinuma shouted back at him, his voice sonorous.
    He swung his stave to the right to block the other’s thrust at his waist, and there was a crack like a bursting firecracker. Then they closed with each other, grappling face to face until their sword arms locked together. The referee separated them.
    At the official’s signal to resume combat, young Iinuma, without pausing for breath, moved upon his opponent like a blue whirlwind, delivering a combination attack aimed at the head. Each blow struck with force and precision, each more intense. So overwhelming was their combined effect that the other boy, after parrying to right and to left to ward off the first and second blows, seemed to take of his own volition the third, which crashed down directly upon his mask. Both referees flung up their small triangular white pennants at the same moment.
    The young athlete had thus eliminated his second opponent, and this time there were shouts of appreciation as well as applause from the spectators.
    “The tactic of pressing with vigor and driving him back for the kill, you see,” the kendo instructor next to Honda observed in an affected tone. “Red there was watching the tip of white’s stave. No better way to lose. It just doesn’t do to eye the other man’s stave. You do it, and you get flurried.”
    Though he knew almost nothing of kendo, Honda grasped that there was something like a coiled spring within this young boy that gave off a dark blue glow. The vigor of his spirit manifested itself without a trace of disorder, and, whatever the resistance, created a vacuum within his opponent’s resolve, if but for an instant. And the usual result was that, just as air is drawn into a vacuum, so this weak spot of his opponent drew Iinuma’s stave. Thrust with perfect form, that stave, Honda thought, would no doubt pierce the guard of any opponent as easily as one enters through an unlocked door.
    The third red opponent confronted young Iinuma, advancing with a weaving