by T. C. Rypel
The others began to remonstrate with him, each in his way. Sebastio took a compassionate tack. Buey, an impatient one, stoked by his own boorish mood. And Sergeant Orozco resorted to weary humor.
But the samurai was unmoved.
“I leave with this thought alone: I’ve only been accepted and fondly remembered here when I’ve killed so that others may live. When I am most Japanese and least European, then am I appreciated. Such is your need in Europe: a strong sword arm to support your own failed efforts. And mine is growing weary, may the kami of war forgive me…”
They passed two stern, unflinching guards in scoured Milanese armor and burgonets. The pair uncrossed their polearms so that the party might enter under the baldacchino. The canopy led into a wing of the palace sequestered for their use. Luigi Leone lay curled on a parlor sofa, snoring, his eye patch askew.
Gonji looked to the mustached sergeant. “You’ve been to the osteria. What are they saying about us?”
“Hmm,” Orozco intoned, a crooked smile on his face. “God bless the tipplers in their bleary cups! The inns have cast us in bronze. We’re legendary phantasms in our own aimless days.”
“Drunks are drunks,” Buey shot back, scowling. “Only an asshole takes anything they say to bed with him.”
Orozco shifted his eyebrows, sat down heavily in a velvet chair. “Ah, but they’ve—”
“What about France?” Gonji interrupted. “What are they saying about France?” He eyed the pair gravely.
Father Sebastio sighed and excused himself, departing for his bedchamber.
Orozco leaned toward Gonji and Buey and spoke more seriously. “Your elusive efforts at detachment from the Knights of Wonder have only deepened your mystique, you know. They—”
“What about France?”
“To hell with France,” the sergeant railed. “Some say you’re still there, fighting demons. Some aren’t so kind.”
“Some call you a madman,” Buey added, his lower jaw working. “And even worse—”
“Shut up, Buey,” Orozco said.
“Ah, so desu ka?” Gonji replied, seating himself cross-legged on the floor. He threw off the cloak and laid his daisho before him. “What else?”
“It’s all bullshit,” Orozco fumed.
“Some say you’re a coward,” Buey said in a low voice, staring at him as if issuing a challenge. “That we’re all cowards. That we ran from our own shadows. From phantoms that still laugh about us in the Cevennes Mountains…”
Gonji stared at his sheathed blades, expressionless. No one made a sound for a time.
“Whatever came up against us in those god-cursed mountains,” Orozco said at last, “it was not a trick of shadows…”
“Perhaps a trick nonetheless,” Gonji said softly, waxing reflective. He began stroking his stubbled chin, working at controlling his breathing, seeking his wa, a harmony of spirit he had not known in an uncomfortably long time.
Buey poured himself a goblet of wine and drank as he studied an alto rilievo on the wall that depicted a knight slaying a demon of Hell in the form of a dragon. He ran a beefy hand along the sculpture as if committing its every contour to memory. “In Savona…they have an oak tree. Big one. Split asunder…like as not by a bolt from the sky. Some say it was your sword that did it. The Wonder Knights, you know. They believe you can do just about anything with that angry curved sword…”
Gonji reached out and picked up the Sagami, slowly easing its gleaming length from the sheath. “I did it all wrong,” he said as if addressing the katana itself. “I left heart and soul behind me and led those fledgling warriors to their doom. A shell of a leader. I served well the purpose of our foes, you see. Karma. Karma that I must bear. Evil makes no such mistakes. You must be strong to combat evil. Strong as you can be. But there is always skill and courage and desire enough, somewhere within. Does not even your own Holy Scripture declare that evil cannot challenge one beyond his capacity to defend himself, though death be the price? And death is as light as a feather…
“So I was wrong, Carlo-san. And so are you, when you say we need regiments to return to Burgundy. We need but a few who can be counted upon. Or perhaps only one…They want Simon alive, among them. They want me alone…suffering; all who would call me friend, dead. And so they shall have me…alone.”
He returned the Sagami to its dark nestling place.
“Then…we’re going back?” Buey asked tentatively, eyes alight.
“First things first,” Gonji evaded. “One duty at a time. Tomorrow, we look at horses…”
Buey peered at Orozco, who glanced up from under a heavy brow.
Gonji’s last violent act in France had been the destruction of the gray destrier that had served him ignobly at the Place of Lost Hope.
* * * *
Nightmares…
Attacking him again in violent tableaux of guilt and horrible death.
Fever-sweat—roiling smears of cascading color and sound—an awesome weight on his chest, a battering ram, driving him downward, downward to the Pit…
* * * *
The Mount of Lost Hope.
Simon had been right. They should have braved winter in the Alps and entered Burgundy from the east, whatever the cost, whatever the peril. For the French borders of Burgundy belonged to the Farouche Clan. They, and their other-worldly minions.
It was not any winter known to humankind that had descended on Burgundy that year. Some dreadful realm had been transposed with Burgundy, exchanged its ungodly arctic fastness with the picturesque charm of a hard but bearable Alpine winter.
Men froze in their saddles, their whining plaint swallowed by exhaustion and hunger. Some dropped in death and were lifted again, quickly, dispiritedly, only to be plunged back into the mounding snows and be abandoned at last, out of military expediency—hands now too cold to struggle with their grisly burden and hearts too numb to care.
Others disappeared from the rear of the column or from flanking positions only to return mysteriously later—rigid corpses lashed to their maddened steeds. Some without eyes; others, bereft of heads or limbs, such that the grisly events engendered spates of insensate whining that something must be using those parts to create some monstrous effigy of a man…
* * * *
The mountains crowded before him again in the great arena of his vindictive spirit, their slopes awash in blood-soaked drifts…
“Gooooon-jiiiii! He comes! Gooon-ji comes! We must prepare for him…make his faithful allies welcome!”
* * * *
The cold sheared through their wraps, and the buffeting wind swirled the impenetrable blizzard about them like the rising walls of a whitened tomb. Still, they were dimly aware that a path of sorts was left them. They were being herded like mindless game beasts toward the slaughter that was not long in coming.
They beat at themselves to stave the icy clutch of the gale and squeezed bundled hands about weapon hilts, praying that their frozen thews would not fail them. The wolves began to howl maniacally, hungrily, from all directions, and the wind shrilled its laughter at their pathetic efforts and failing courage.
Men lost heart, and lives followed in due course.
In the first quicksilver engagement, the snow canyon was splashed and mottled with gore, and still the lifeblood exploded from their fellows.
Gonji and Simon Sardonis swore and bellowed and commanded them to hold fast under pain of death, their threats hollow, ironic, unheeded by ears filled with the slashing and rending sounds of mortal agony. Mounts fell, and men were buried in the carnage. Weapons shattered in the cold amidst the occasional forlorn report of a working pistol.
Simon’s horse went down as the ensorceled warrior took a toll of the savage assailants with broadsword and battle-axe. Gonji strove to keep Simon in sight, even
as the samurai whirled the razor-edged steel of his twin blades, to right and left, at monstrous, hurtling forms that pounded and tore, snarled and snapped and ripped open savage wounds in lurid arcs of crimson, amidst the screaming.
Gonji soon lost cognizance of Simon in the throes of his own survival frenzy.
The wolves abruptly withdrew, dragging off their hard-won prey in viselike jaws. The remnant of the troop staggered about, some unhorsed, some astride shrilling mounts, mad-eyed and seeking direction. Simon urged them onward over oaths and screams and the pleas of the mutilated and the dying.
Gonji began to count heads, recognized several comforting faces—Buey, Jarret, Perigor, Leone—
And then they were under attack again, their enemies humanoid this time, if not assuredly human. Creatures armored in steel and bone and hide, hoisting staffs bearing terrible symbols, fell upon them with sword and guisarme, axe and flail. The creatures’ awful bellowing bloodlust numbed their souls and set their teeth on edge. Their horses reared and cowered on their haunches in the attackers’ first shrieking wave.
The company fought on the run, lurching and bolting over mounds of corpses and men and animals and things that were not quite either. Bodies of men were heaped among those of dwarves—sere forms of what must surely have been the reanimated dead—stout, burly, hairy brutes that were more ape than man—gnarled and ugly haunters of the dark, who were no less fearsome when staked in death by valiant polearm thrusts.
And then they were put to rout, the Company of Lost Hope—crashing against one another as they wheeled their steeds and bounded back again over the killing grounds they had won, fighting all the while in the gore-streaked, bloody snowdrifts. Their foes ringed them in on all sides, the elements aiding the creatures as they burst forth from tunnels in the snow or leapt out of piled liches. Ghastly forms leered and lanced out with blood-soaked, flesh-encrusted weapons, belly-cutting mounts and rending adventurers’ legs. Torment before death…
The maddened destrier threw Gonji into the snow. The horse bucked and stamped at him in its panic as he tried to catch up the reins. He split open two attackers with growling, scythelike strokes of his blades before narrowly gaining the saddle again, only to be thrown by the horse twice more before he had reached the area of red ruin where the wolves had descended on them.
Their pursuers ceased to follow at that point, laughing keeningly at their departing backs, calling out tauntingly.
Gonji could not tell how many men had lived to retreat with him, only barely accepting the fact that it had been a retreat, still clutching at ragged, wrathful thoughts of ordering yet another about-face, a doomed charge into those gloating, hideous visages.
But that was impossible. All he knew—all any of those tortured, plodding bladesmen knew—was that the killing had stopped. The screams were dying in their ears as they fled.
And at that moment, there in that charnel snow canyon, surcease of the horror was all that mattered.
* * * *
Nightmares…
The ghastly death-march southward, back along their former swaggering track…
* * * *
More cunning now, more drawn from secret corridors of unknown terror, were the onslaughts at their departing backs.
The canyon of snow became a frozen tundra they could not outrun but only plod and slog through with heads hung low and bodies too weakened to offer defense. Frozen ghosts on horseback, they drifted southward. Stragglers, broken warriors, speaking nothing, caring not to gaze into one another’s ice-crusted faces.
Gonji found that Orozco was alive, and his heart was briefly lightened. At least four of Perigor’s troop also chugged along at their ponderous gait through the haunch-deep crusted snow.
But their relief in living allies was fleeting. Doubling back along the bloody, corpse-strewn trail only focused them as targets, toys for the amusement of supernatural assailants.
Night swept down from the sky in an impossible swirling gray fog. Black shapes moved within it, stark shadows with menacing substance, watching, waiting. At last working their demon-spawned evil.
Flying shapes, bulky and vermin-furred, began to strafe the survivors from above. At first they merely antagonized with their piercing titters as they soared overhead. Then they would single out a horseman who had strayed from the rest and arc down to buffet him with their wings and formless limbs. Finally one man reined in his steed, halted its endless plodding, signaling his own doom. Once stopped, a horse could no longer find strength and courage enough to resume its plunging at the relentless tundra.
The fogbound horrors swarmed him. His voice cried out in French, hurling oaths as he swung a weapon overhead with pathetically useless strokes. Horse and rider crashed sideways into the snow bank, which seemed to open and engulf him. There was no helping him. His fellows angled their complaining mounts toward him, cursing, threatening in cracked and strained voices. The warrior, mired to the shoulders in reddening snow, was seized and borne off by the flying demons, his wretched struggles a distant, smoky-gray silhouette.
It was his screaming that went down hardest.
“My wife! O Jesus God Almighty! My wife—don’t tell her it was like this…”
“Oh, Christ—”
It was Buey whose furious kicking at his lathered steed at last brought him near to the place where the creatures had brought the screaming man to ground, to work their evil on his tormented body and soul before bearing him off. The Ox called out a challenge, and a hulking gray shape that had lingered behind rose straight up into the air and curled through the curtain of mist above Buey, to swoop and engage him.
Gonji kicked his steed and twisted at the reins, with great effort finally steering the recalcitrant destrier in Buey’s direction. Snow swirled up into his eyes, obscuring his vision. He strained to see Buey and the strafing monster.
Hearing the Spaniard’s curse, Gonji searched for a weapon, blinking as if out of a dream, to see the naked blade of the Sagami sheathed in his broad belt. Cold comfort—The bared edge of his heat-tempered soul sang free. The samurai winced to see the blood that caked his garb, his horse’s flanks. He saw a fleeting glimpse of the strange broken nettles hooked into his greatcoat in spots. Remembered briefly engaging an enemy with clawed hands backed with thorny, curved barbs, then…
He saw Buey’s sidewise lurch in the saddle. And the broken shaft of a halberd suddenly snapping upward in the huge soldier’s grasp. The shriek of alarm—the dark spill into the snow between them—the skewed flight of the monster as it plunged straight for Gonji in its pain-maddened flight—
Gonji’s katana rasped free in a two-handed clench. He saw the eyeless visage of something like a mole. A shrew. Bulbous bat-ears. Gaping jaws full of pointed teeth that were stained dark.
He slashed hard, twice, eyes clenching shut. He felt the thudding weight that knocked him off his horse. Heard the muffled wail as he fell through the snow-crust, a coppery smell in his nostrils—
A grisly, snowbound grave began filling up around him.
Gonji heard a pounding impact in the snow not far off as he fought to the surface of the small avalanche that churned over him. Gasping, he instinctively raised the Sagami to high guard, then cast about for orientation.
The hideous beast lay thrashing in the snow behind him, spurting its noxious lifeblood. His horse, wildly galvanized to feel its burden lifted, had begun to surge away without him, laboring hard through the snows. He cursed and called its name, heard his own name called once or twice from mist-shrouded figures nearby. Scrabbling and digging through the path his horse had frantically beat, he regained its flank and fought astride though the gray destrier bucked and whinnied for fair, determined to dislodge him once and for all.
He searched out Buey’s figure, found him still among the living, caught a glimpse of Brett Jarret, nodding repeatedly
just to his right and rear, clouds of desperate breath puffing about the French highwayman, amidst a fresh snow-swirl.
Buey made a tortuous path through virgin crust to anchor with them for strength. Just then they heard the pitiful wailing of Dalbert, the loquacious adventurer from St. Pons.
He was a barely recognizable figure in the veil of vaporous air to their left. It was not the flying vermin that had gotten him but something else. The dark shapes, their eyes glowing as pale and green as some well-avoided mold clinging to a wizard’s curing vat.
Dalbert’s screams sang of untold torture, his pleading both trenchant and vexing to Gonji in a way only a samurai could understand. It was dishonorable to allow one’s enemies such satisfaction and insulting to the warriors who were given to hear. Yet he felt sympathy for the man, who had survived so much only to suffer—what?
“Jesus-God,” Brett swore, “what are they doing to him?”
“Riding him,” came Buey’s confused, tearful voice.
Dalbert had ceased to scream. And it seemed as though one of the demons had mounted his back, enveloped him in its foul caress.
“Gonji,” sounded a voice much like Dalbert’s, though distorted, reverberating in a way that made the flesh crawl.
“Gonjiiiiiii! You did this to me, Gonji! Why did you let this happen to me? They want you now…They want yoooooouuu!”
Gonji raised the Sagami again, in impotent fury, as his mount stumbled, righted itself. More survivors gathered near, huddling together, weapons fisted in frozen hands, prepared for some awful final attack as predators howled in the distance.
He saw Corbeau. And Perigor. One-eyed Leone. Orozco. Two more French brigands. An Italian mercenary. One of Sergeant Villiers’ charges, bleeding from chest and leg. They drew courage from one another, fused their wills with glances of grim determination. And pressed on.
